- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
US stock markets have been hit by a further wave of AI jitters, this time from yet another viral – and completely speculative – warning about the impact of the technology on the world’s largest economy.
The latest foreboding is from Citrini Research, a little-known US firm that provides insights on “transformative ‘megatrends’”. Its post on Substack, which it called a “scenario, not a prediction”, rattled investors by portraying a near future in which autonomous AI systems – or agents – upend the entire US economy, from jobs to markets and mortgages.
Citrini’s scenario begins now and ends in June 2028, with US unemployment cresting over 10% and an Occupy Silicon Valley movement setting up camp outside OpenAI and Anthropic’s offices. In the interim, a series of events triggered by the widespread use of AI agents guts software companies and ripples outwards, hitting private credit and mortgages, and leading to an unchecked downward spiral.
Speculative as it is, the scenario has unnerved investors. The S&P dropped more than 1% on Monday, and the software component of the index fell to its lowest level since Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement in April. Doubtless some of the wobble is attributable to Trump’s latest tariffs, but Uber, American Express, Mastercard and DoorDash, specifically named in Citrini’s report, all lost between 4% and 6%.
Delivering food has a cost and is a service. Before things like doordash you could only get delivery from select locations, by creating a network of drivers you can now get delivery from most restaurants.
Does doordash exploit people and restaurants, yes. However, providing a delivery service is not rent seeking there is something being offered.
What fucking stupid, late stage capitalist, Pollyannic naive horse shit. Wow.
DoorDash doesn’t provide a delivery service. They don’t pay delivery drivers to deliver, they don’t provide vehicles, benefits, or even consider drivers employees. People pay DoorDash for access to use their software/platform to receive requests from customers for delivery services. DoorDash offers a series of contract plans in which a driver pays fees for various tiers of DoorDash acting as a payment processor, can opt for a per-job rate reductions to guarantee a “base job rate” (without any guarantee of jobs assigned), and are otherwise uncompensated for “non-active” time.
The exploitation comes in the form of a monopolized rentier platform. In the same way that you might pay a landlord for access to a space to rest your pretty little head at night, restaurants and drivers pay premiums for access to a digital space to market services to one another. DoorDash doesn’t make anything other than software, and you can’t even “buy” DoorDash’s software.
Instead of creating value through the production of goods, DoorDash acts as a digital landlord that extracts surplus value (rent) from both restaurants and laborers by controlling the digital infrastructure necessary for exchange.
Just like a landlord, DoorDash owns the digital “land” (i.e. the application, algorithm, and user interface) connecting customers, merchants, and workers.By controlling this infrastructure, DoorDash acts as a tollbooth. It charges restaurants a high commission fee (ranging from 15% to 30%+) for every order. This fee is a form of monopoly rent, where DoorDash takes a portion of the restaurant’s profits simply for allowing them to access customers, similar to a landlord extracting rent.
DoorDash does not cook the food or directly employ the delivery workers as staff (again, they’re “contractors”, which DD has lobbied heavily to ensure). The restaurant produces the value (the food), and the driver performs the labor of delivery. They are a glorified phone service, however convenient or “neato” you might think they are.