by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-26 21:16:02+00:00
> We consented to Uber’s terms and conditions. When did we consent to AI?

A lot of people were and are upset about Uber basically violating existing taxi regulations. But a lot more people used Uber enthusiastically anyway, because it provided a better experience than the existing taxi regulations.

> With that in mind, when ride-sharing apps first launched, they seemed to me an affront to capitalism. From the sidelines, I felt as if I were watching a hostile takeover of an entire industry cloaked in “Innovation” propaganda. The same was true of Airbnb: a nearly overnight heist of hospitality revenue. Neither was service innovation, but interface innovation. The interface was the key to making this shakedown possible; it was designed to deconstruct the physical constraints and overhead of industry and capture the profits.

I don't see how the thing described is an affront to capitalism. Capitalism has no problem with hostile takeovers of entire industries cloaked in innovation propaganda, or interface rather than service innovations.

Anyway, this article is making a weird argument. It's not actually illegal in general to sell eggs from your backyard chickens, and if it is technically illegal in some places, it probably shouldn't be. But precisely because it's a small-scale, distributed and individual business practice, it's also unlikely to get on anyone's radar. If someone did try to make an app that creates a marketplace for people selling produce from their own garden - well, actually, that sounds like it might be a good idea for a software platform (I also think there are existing software platforms already doing something pretty close to this). I don't actually think it should be illegal and I would oppose laws making it illegal.

> Well, that’s exactly what has been done. Uber pushed state legislatures to pass laws that preempted local authority over ride-hailing — by the mid-2010s, dozens of states had passed laws that limited cities’ ability to regulate prices, licensing, or worker standards. In San Francisco, Airbnb spent roughly $8 million to defeat Proposition F, a 2015 ballot measure that would have imposed stricter limits on short-term rentals. Both companies spent millions more on federal and state lobbying, litigation, and grassroots campaigns designed to blunt or eliminate regulations.

I don't think any of these things should be illegal either, in part because they make it illegal for businesses like Uber and AirBnB that offer a better product than what came previously to operate. I don't blame them for lobbying to repeal these laws and I'd support the repeal myself regardless.

> These so-called innovations left entire classes of workers behind, their livelihoods devalued overnight, their expertise suddenly worthless because an app made it easy for anyone to compete with them without training, licensing, or insurance. The theft was abstract enough to be deniable. The Ubers and Airbnbs could claim they didn’t really take anything — they simply offered a better way to connect people. The fact that entire industries collapsed and workers were displaced was just the invisible hand of the market doing its work.

One person's labor is another person's cost. Even if you think that it's bad for Airbnb and Uber to have disrupted several industries - which is isomorphic to supporting protective tariffs, incidentally - I don't think it's correct to characterize what they did as theft.

> You could argue that when we installed the Uber app, we consented to its terms and conditions in full: not just to the conveniences it offered us in the moment but the consequences it introduced to people and communities. But when did we consent to AI? It’s been added to our lives without our request or permission. It’s read our email, listened to our phone calls, and scraped our webpages — for years — without us really knowing it. Then we were given silly new AI toys and told “go make memes”; it showed up in our apps and accounts, its uninvited sparkle reminding us who owns what; just a few years later, we’re told “now go make another way of life.”

If AI is reading your email or phone calls, it's because you're sending those emails and phone calls on unencrypted channels, and probably ones where you signed an agreement, much like the Uber terms of service, to some company where you agreed to do this. Personally, I think it's bad that emails and phone calls are basically done unencrypted as a matter of course, and I'd prefer for people to use encrypted text and voice communication channels for these things, regardless of whether or not the data is being scraped for LLM training. If AI is reading your web pages, it's because you put your web page on the public internet for anyone at all to read.

I'm also honestly pretty annoyed with the passive framing of this sentence - "we were given", "we wer e told". It betrays a lack of personal agency. A company springing into existence to try and sell AI-based software products to people is not manipulating you - they are selling a product they think people might want, and you are free to not pay for it. I frankly think that many AI-based products are incredibly useful, not toys at all, and my biggest concern with LLM inference being controlled by large companies is that they will try to censor my use of their inference capacity or otherwise cut me off. Which is why I care a lot about self-hosting my own AI inference, just like how I self-host a Jellyfin server for my music rather than use Spotify.