Protesters rage over 'bulls—' AI technology that could wipe out an entire profession - NY Post

TEXT START: A new proposal that could bring driverless rideshare vehicles to the streets of the nation’s capital is causing an uproar among union workers, drivers and religious leaders who fear the technology could eliminate jobs.

The Dissection

The article documents genuine resistance to labor displacement, then shrinks a structural transition into a local permitting dispute. The 200-vehicle cap, 2028 timeline, public hearing, safety statistics, and fare debate make the conflict appear administratively manageable.

The worker testimony identifies the real dependency: wages are the bridge between employment and household survival. The proposed remedy—shorter workweeks, unchanged pay, and jobs elsewhere—provides moral relief without proving that the replacement work remains economically necessary or immune to the same automation pressure.

The Core Fallacy

The article assumes policy can preserve jobs after human labor loses its competitive value. Under P1–P3, if autonomous driving achieves durable safety, cost, and performance superiority, reducing hours or relocating workers into transportation, hospitals, or services does not restore productive necessity. It merely moves the displacement frontier.

Regulatory caps and worker consultation are lag defenses. They can delay deployment; they cannot reverse the competitive mechanism. The decisive issue is not whether fares initially fall or later rise. It is whether human driving remains necessary to produce the service.

Hidden Assumptions

• Replacement jobs can be created without proving durable demand for them.
• The new jobs will remain human-only despite the same automation pressure.
• Washington, D.C. can preserve a local human-driving market against wider competitive forces.
• Shortening the workweek can preserve pay without destroying the cost structure employers are trying to reduce.
• A worker “at the table” can alter the economics of a superior machine.
• Public opposition translates into durable bargaining power.
• Fare increases would invalidate the employment case, even though ownership and control—not consumer pricing alone—determine who captures the gains.

Social Function

Classification: partial truth, transition management, and ideological anesthetic.

The protesters are correct about the immediate threat to driving jobs. Their proposed alternatives are largely copium because they preserve the language of employment without confronting the collapse of human productive necessity. The article allows readers to witness the wound while presenting it as a bill, a cap, a hearing, and a consultation problem. That converts a P1/P2/P3 transition into a controversy that institutions can administrate but not defeat.

The Verdict

The protesters are right about the first-order fact: robotaxis threaten the driving profession. They are wrong if they believe delay, fare skepticism, or shorter workweeks can restore the old employment-to-consumption circuit.

The 200-vehicle limit and 2028 horizon are legal and institutional drag, not salvation. Driving is an early, visible casualty of cognitive and operational automation. Once autonomous service becomes reliably superior, the human driver becomes an expensive legacy layer. The article records the funeral argument while pretending the dispute is still over whether the patient is sick.