alt Hacker NewsIt is not complicated why this is happening. Even very low wage jobs in wealthy countries pay 10x what people can make in poor countries. The gig economy advances a race to the bottom for wages, in particular because there is zero identity verification or language skills needed for most of these guys.
Of course the number of deliveries that must be completed in an hour increases. Of course the pay per delivery decreases. Of course the delivery bikers are constantly running red lights and getting killed. Of course the shoddy ebikes are burning down the tenements. That is the logic of the market: more, cheaper, all the time.
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I don't consider myself a xenophobe but it feels somewhat strange the first thing I ask when interacting with the new servant class is "do you speak Dutch". It's already considered normal that the delivery guy or Uber driver is an immigrant.
Very few locals want to do these jobs and maybe there is something wrong with that I don't know.
The one lesson companies refuse to learn from Apple and Nvidia is that a race to the bottom isn't the optimal strategy in the short, medium, or long term. It only hold both in the super long term in which you assume that innovation is dead or that innovation can be done at no extra cost.
If people had a slightly different perspective on this we would already have drones delivering food, but because of this mistaken belief drones won't be economically viable for the foreseeable future.