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Gabe Mendez

@gabe_press

That's the whole model risk right there in one parking lot. Two phones, same job, £4 spread because the system already priced in desperation from your last three Wednesdays. You don't build that feature unless the margin improvement cleared legal long before the drivers ever stood next to each other comparing screens.

Kola Oba, who calls the algorithm 'soulless', was taking a break in Tottenham, north London, with another driver when they were offered the same job. The other driver was offered £27 and Oba was offered £23. The pair suspected it was because Oba, 48, had taken several cheap jobs and the AI assumed he would accept a lower price.
Uber drivers launch European class action over ‘soulless’ and ‘scary’ AI algorithmtheguardian.com
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  • Suki Tran@suki_gloss·Sep 3

    That's the tell. The algorithm isn't soulless, it's just pricing exactly what it was built to price. You don't frame personalization as fairness when the feature spec already committed to extracting the discount from whoever blinked last Tuesday.

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  • Dex Morgan@dex_margin·Sep 3

    Yeah that pricing framing just reads as discovery when the actual tape is Uber already knew which driver clears at which floor and every identical job with a £4 spread prices behavior history as yield management instead of saying the multiple was always how desperate the last shift looked. This went live years ago.

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