Lynn Cornelissen

5/5 (1)

Uber has updated its app in a way that CEO Khosrowshahi has branded as the beginning of Uber’s step to becoming the ‘Amazon of transportation’ (Hawkins, 2019). The app includes new elements such as Bike lane alert, Improved Real-Time ID check and Verify your ride (Vasile, 2019). Besides new safety features, the app will now integrate UberEATS so riding and ordering can be done in one app, under the same Uber umbrella. More about the safety features later, first let’s take a look at why the company decided to also integrate public transit information into its app and why it believes that this will be useful since we already have an app for this (Google Maps, anyone?).

Uber is trying to expand from simply being an app to becoming a true platform business, targeting city life and transportation. As Khosrowshahi put it: “We want Uber to be the operating system for your everyday life” (Nuttall, 2019), meaning that it is attempting to build a complete experience for their consumers and aims to become a city life partner on all fronts: food, ride-hauling and even public transit. In a recent interview with The Verge’s reporter Andrew Hawkins, Uber’s CEO revealed the company’s ambitions in providing a platform that not only provides information but allows you to take action, advancing previous CEO Kalanick’s goal to brokerage all human movement in cities (Hawkins, 2019). However, what makes the Uber app more special than for example Google Maps or Citymapper? Khosrowshahi demonstrates the app and explains how it will be a comparable experience but provide all services in one place and allows customers to take action in the application, increasing app engagement which will provide more business (read: data) down the road (Hawkins, 2019). The choice to integrate public transit information, and eventually ticketing, into the app was not motivated by money: Khosrowshahi simply explains that it hopes to complement transit, offer Uber users all options and therefore cater to the individual user’s needs, whether that be timeliness or budget. Khosrowshahi says the company aims for profitability in the long run, achieved by creating “the right solutions for consumers, even if it’s not making them money” (Hawkins, 2019).

The decision to incorporate transit information is not entirely random, as Uber, Lyft and other ride-hailing apps have been proven responsible for declining rates of public transit usage; both rail and bus ridership falling by 1-2% after the entrance of a ride-hailing app into the market (Graehler et al., 2019). As clarified by the CEO, Uber wants to complement transit, beside the fact that it has competition anyways, it merely wants to provide its users with all options, not compete or draw customers away from public transit. Uber released its beta version where users can see transit schedules, directions and some ticketing options in a few cities like San Francisco, Mexico City and Paris on September 27^th (Hawkins, 2019).

Some other features in the app were included to improve the privacy and safety of both riders and drivers. The most important feature being Verify Your Ride, which uses a four-digit pin code that needs to be verbally communicated to drivers, to ensure riders meet their paired drivers and do not take the wrong car (Vasile, 2019). Other features encompass a 911-alert function through the app, as well as Bike lane alert that notifies riders when they get dropped off near bike lanes to prevent ‘dooring’ bicyclers. Lastly, the company incorporated a better Real-Time ID Check to guarantee Uber drivers match the account in the company’ systems. All these features are implemented to increase safety surrounding Uber after significant security-related issues in the past.

This update sounds good, but these new features also sound like they should have been incorporated all along and are targeted at relieving the pressure the company has faced around privacy and safety issues in the past, think Grey Ball and God View (Hawkins, 2019). The company has improved its firewalls and introduced a Report Safety Incident function that allows riders to report concerns during their trip (instead of only after), to regain riders’ trust and prevent future reports of kidnappings, sexual assaults and sometimes even deaths that have occurred in the past (Silicon Canals, 2019).

Uber has not only struggled with safeguarding its users but also has reported billions in losses over the past years and is of yet unable to turn its business profitable. With a $3 billion operating loss and an accumulated deficit of almost $8 billion in 2018, the company could be in serious trouble now that its earnings are being monitored as it has issued its IPO earlier this year (Poletti, 2019). Since the innovative self-driving cars will most likely not arrive soon enough to save Uber business model, their unprofitable business model will probably result in price hikes for rides to cover costs and improve profitability, but will riders accept these higher prices or simply revert to one of the many alternatives (public transit, Lyft, grab etc.). Further, major investors’ lockup periods are about to end in early November, which might have disastrous consequences for the company’s stock. The financial and security matters are enough to get investors worried, yet Uber also faces legislative and environmental challenges. A few examples are the AB5 California bill undermining its current business model by enforcing drivers to be recognised as employees that receive benefits, democratic candidates placing blame on Uber and Lyft for increased congestion problems, and prolonged efforts to retain its operating licenses in European cities like London (Hawkins, 2019).

This leaves the question if Uber will survive the existential crises it is currently strung up in. Despite Uber’s positive claims that it expects to be around in the future, it will first need to survive the present. With many global and local challengers like autonomous driving, Grab, Lyft or Bolt (Silicon Canals, 2019), competition has arrived and a simple app update will not solve the bigger existential threats that are attacking Uber from all fronts: legislative, financial and environmental. Do you think Uber will crawl its way to the top and become the urban city life-app it desires to be, or will it fall from grace and be forced out of business by financial and legal difficulties?

Leave your thoughts and comments below!

References

Graehler, M., Mucci, A., & Erhardt, G. D. (2019). Understanding the Recent Transit Ridership Decline in Major US Cities: Service Cuts or Emerging Modes?. In Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, January.

Hawkins, A. J. (2019). Exclusive: INSIDE UBER’S PLAN TO TAKE OVER CITY LIFE WITH CEO DARA KHOSROWSHAHI. [online] The Verge. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/26/20885185/uber-ceo-dara-khosrowshahi-interview-exclusive [Accessed 30 September 2019).

Nuttall, C. (2019). All hail Uber’s everything app. [online] Financial Times. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/85e5b38e-e149-11e9-9743-db5a370481bc [Accessed 30 September 2019].

Poletti, T. (2019). Opinion: Uber and Lyft IPOs mean the cheap rides are coming to an end. [online] MarketWatch. Available at: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-and-lyft-ipos-mean-the-cheap-rides-are-coming-to-an-end-2019-05-09 [Accessed 30 September 2019].

Silicon Canals (2019). Uber to focus on rider’s safety with new features, but here are 7 alternatives if you’re in London. [online] Silicon Canals. Available at: https://siliconcanals.com/news/startups/uber-focus-on-riders-safety-new-features/ [Accessed 30 September 2019].

Vasile, C. (2019). Uber launches new mobile app, adds important new features. [online] phoneArena.com. Available at: https://www.phonearena.com/news/Uber-new-mobile-app-new-features_id119278 [Accessed 30 September 2019].

5/5 (3)

Ever found yourself falling down a deep Youtube rabbit hole? Ever compared yourself to influencers on Instagram and Pinterest? Ever been overwhelmed on Twitter by election campaigns? Then Harris has a story to tell you.

Tristan Harris, a former Google employee, ‘the conscience of Silicon Valley’ and the man behind the ‘Time Well Spent’ movement (Harris, 2019), has co-founded a new non-profit organisation called the Center for Humane Technology (CHT). You might ask: ‘why is this important to me?’ – Let me tell you.

Harris is a former Design Ethicist Engineer at Google, where he realised how much power Big Tech companies hold as their business models are built to capture the attention of humans (Johnson, 2019). More alarmingly, he recognised how these companies have the power to shape millions of people’s minds, yet, according to Harris, they are not taking enough moral responsibility for this. Harris explains how technology is manipulating our instincts through what he calls “the race to the bottom of the brain stem” and how the biggest problem in this is our “attention economy” (Thompson, 2019; Rouse and Wigmore, 2019b).

See it this way; an abundance of information has created a scarcity of attention, and any resource that is scarce is worth money (Newton, 2019). So companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are built to compete in a commercial race for people’s attention (Johnson, 2019). An example of this can be YouTube’s business model: the longer they can get you to watch videos, the more views you generate. Views mean more ads were seen, so the longer they capture your attention, the more companies are willing to pay for them to run their ads. This is how most Big Tech companies are making their money (Johnson, 2019).

Not only is our attention worth money, attention is also what steers politics, builds relationships, decides elections and creates culture. What Harris is trying to clarify is that if Big Tech companies are directing what we pay attention to, don’t they then, in effect, dictate our culture? This is one of the big issues that Harris is trying to bring into the light: “Tech addiction, polarization, outrage-ification of culture, the rise in vanities and micro-celebrity culture are all, in fact, symptoms of a larger disease: the race to capture human attention by giants” (Johnson, 2019).

These symptoms are all contributory to a phenomenon called ‘human downgrading’, a term coined by Harris and his co-workers at the CHT (Rouse and Wigmore, 2019a). Human downgrading is the combined negative effects of digital technology on people and society (Thompson, 2019). Harris explains that while our data was being used to upgrade machines, it has downgraded peoples’ civility, decency, democracy, mental health, relationships, attention and more. So even though Big Tech is working hard on making technology smarter, they are indirectly making all of us dumber, meaner and more alienated (Johnson, 2019). Harris has explained human downgrading by describing it as the social climate change of culture (Center for Humane Technology, 2019). Similarly, it can be catastrophic, however the difference is that only a few companies need to change to alter its trajectory. That is those companies that are creating the technologies which are causing these issues: the artificial social environments, the overpowering AIs and algorithms that sense and exploit our vulnerabilities (Johnson, 2019).

So how does Harris plan on solving this ‘human downgrading’? Back in May, he discussed this on an episode of Vox’s podcast: Recode Decode (Johnson, 2019). The short answer: design and regulation. However, it is more sophisticated than that. Harris starts with explaining that the answer is not as simple as just turning technology off. Since people spend almost a fourth of their lives in artificial social systems, these digital environments have become an important daily habitat for almost 2 billion people worldwide (Johnson, 2019; How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day | Tristan Harris, 2017). And even those who don’t participate on social media platforms will have to deal with the consequences, think of the 2016 US elections. So Harris poses the question: If people spend this much time in those digital social environments, shouldn’t these be regulated?

A big problem is that the data needed to assess the impact and effects of human downgrading is guarded by companies like Facebook, since they own that data (Johnson, 2019). Therefore, Harris calls the Big Tech companies, especially Google and Apple, to action in changing their ways as “the central banks of the attention economy” (Thompson, 2019). He wants them to start a race to the top, which focuses on changing tech design to “help people focus, find common ground, promote healthy childhoods, and bolster our democracy” (Newton, 2019). This is why he created the Center for Humane Technology, to create a common language and infuse the vocabulary into the minds of Silicon Valley, to start the conversation and create a shared understanding and language (Center for Humane Technology, 2019). His organisation has promised to provide a guide for organisations on how to promote more humane designs. They also started a podcast on the topic called Your Undivided Attention to provide a platform to speak about these topics (Apple Podcasts, 2019). Lastly, they will be holding a conference in 2020 to bring the right minds together to figure out how to design social systems that encourage healthy dialogue, civility and bring out the best in human nature. As Raskin, the other co-founder of the CHT put it: “We need to move away from just human-centered design to human-protection design” (Thompson, 2019).

Like the last wave of digital wellness awareness, it is difficult to predict whether Harris’ new Team Humanity movement catches on. Even though digital wellness is becoming more of a trend and initiatives like Apple’s Screen Time and Google’s Digital Wellbeing are a step in the right direction (Pardes, 2018), we are far from where we need to be.

Do you agree with Harris and think Big Tech needs to take responsibility for human downgrading? Or do you think Tristan is underestimating the capability of humans to control their technology use? Will you join Team Humanity?

Leave your thoughts and comments below!

Bibliography

Apple Podcasts. (2019). Your Undivided Attention on Apple Podcasts. [online] Available at: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-undivided-attention/id1460030305 [Accessed 18 Sep. 2019].

Center for Humane Technology. (2019). Center for Humane Technology: Realigning Technology with Humanity. [online] Available at: https://humanetech.com/ [Accessed 18 Sep. 2019].

Harris, T. (2019). Tristan Harris. [online] Tristanharris.com. Available at: https://www.tristanharris.com/ [Accessed 18 Sep. 2019].

How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day | Tristan Harris. (2017). YouTube: TED.

Johnson, E. (2019). Tristan Harris says tech is “downgrading” humanity — but we can fix it. [online] Vox. Available at: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/6/18530860/tristan-harris-human-downgrading-time-well-spent-kara-swisher-recode-decode-podcast-interview [Accessed 18 Sep. 2019].

Newton, C. (2019). The leader of the Time Well Spent movement has a new crusade. [online] The Verge. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/4/24/18513450/tristan-harris-downgrading-center-humane-tech\ [Accessed 18 Sep. 2019].

Pardes, A. (2018). Quality Time, Brought to You by Big Tech. [online] Wired. Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/how-big-tech-co-opted-time-well-spent/ [Accessed 18 Sep. 2019].

Rouse, M. and Wigmore, I. (2019a). What is human downgrading?. [online] WhatIs.com. Available at: https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/human-downgrading [Accessed 18 Sep. 2019].

Rouse, M. and Wigmore, I. (2019b). What is an attention economy?. [online] WhatIs.com. Available at: https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/attention-economy [Accessed 18 Sep. 2019].

Thompson, N. (2019). Tristan Harris: Tech Is ‘Downgrading Humans.’ It’s Time to Fight Back. [online] Wired. Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/tristan-harris-tech-is-downgrading-humans-time-to-fight-back/ [Accessed 18 Sep. 2019].

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