Schools Are Still Not Like Ubers

Betsy DeVos (who will soon not be a humble servant in the education secretary's office, but will instead be a very rich lady who wants to dismantle public education) likes to compare her vision of education to the same kind of disruption offered by outfits like Uber, a comparison that many folks like to make. I've written before about what a lousy comparison that is, focusing on problems like a business mentality and the problems of automation.

But here's a quick piece by techno-critic Cory Doctorow to remind us that Uber is, at the end, a terrible thing for anybody to want to emulate. Instead, he says, Uber was "a company that was never, ever going to be profitable, which existed solely to launder billions for the Saudi royals."

Doctorow connects Uber to a Saudi plan to diversify and capture monopolies in other sectors as a cushion against future downturns in the oil market. Their plan for Uber was, well...

The S1 – the document that explains how the company plans to be profitable – set two conditions for Uber's profitability.

First, all the public transit in the world had to shut down and be replaced by Uber.

Next, all the drivers had to be replaced by AIs.

Uber recently unloaded its self-driving car division, which, like most self-driving car initiatives, was getting nowhere. (Doctorow reminds us one of my favorite AI auto moments, when developers determined that AI cars would work great as soon as we controlled all human behavior around them.) As he points out, the unloading was not exactly a "sale," because they "invested" $400 mill in the startup taking over the division, which is another way of saying that Uber paid the company to take the AI auto division off their hands.  

Uber survives by being willing to lose money, by breaking the law, and by treating its employees like work-for-hire chattel. I ruled it out as a model for education because it is a business, but it's not even a good business. Even if you pooh-pooh Doctorow's views, Uber is still not a successful business by any definition of the term--it doesn't make money, it doesn't make the world a better place, it doesn't lift up anybody except the few at the top. The New York Times porofile was entitled "How Uber got lost," but it's not clear they were ever on a workable path, ever. Other businesses should not be imitating Uber, and education most certainly should not.