Your Uber Has Arrived… For Your Job

Earlier this month, we worried that someday all of our jobs might be performed by robots.

Turns out that worry might be a little outdated.

What should we worry about instead? That we might all lose our jobs to “Uberization:”

Just as Uber is doing for taxis, new technologies have the potential to chop up a broad array of traditional jobs into discrete tasks that can be assigned to people just when they’re needed, with wages set by a dynamic measurement of supply and demand, and every worker’s performance constantly tracked, reviewed and subject to the sometimes harsh light of customer satisfaction.

That’s from Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times. He quotes NYU business professor Arun Sundararajan’s vision of what Uberization might look like:

“We may end up with a future in which a fraction of the work force would do a portfolio of things to generate an income — you could be an Uber driver, an Instacart shopper, an Airbnb host and a Taskrabbit.”

I feel like this future is already here.

It’s fascinating that Sundararajan describes the future of work within the context of brands. It’s not that you’re going to become a driver and a housecleaner and a tutor; you’ll be an Uber driver, a Handybook housecleaner, a Kaplan tutor. He presents “Taskrabbit” without any explanation, because it doesn’t need one; the brand has already become synonymous with the work it does.

“I do think we are defining a new category of work that isn’t full-time employment but is not running your own business either,” Sundararajan tells Manjoo, but it sounds a lot like the old category of work, especially for people who’ve worked, say, retail jobs for Target or Safeway: the boss is a huge brand, the boss cannot guarantee regular hours, the boss continually tracks you, the boss can schedule and assign work at any time.

Manjoo describes this future as a “hellish vision,” noting:

The larger worry about on-demand jobs is not about benefits, but about a lack of agency — a future in which computers, rather than humans, determine what you do, when and for how much.

And there we are, back to robots again. (Technically software, but you get the point.)

Maybe the real worry is that, in the future, our jobs won’t be performed by robots — but our bosses will be.

And we can all blame Uber for it, even though we’ve been heading towards this inevitability ever since Just In Time and “flexible” scheduling. I don’t mind blaming Uber for it, anyway.

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