Over a decade ago, Uber began its rollout to the most divergent public reaction to a Silicon Valley startup ever. Tech investors and frustrated taxi riders alike were elated at its radical, decentralized approach to transportation and the immense potential for profit that approach entailed.
Taxi drivers and city regulatory bodies, on the other hand, were evidently not so happy. Taxi permits, which previously had been extremely valuable assets, were essentially nullified by this new company that strolled into their cities, gave away free rides and swept away the customers of a centuries-old taxi industry.
While professionals worldwide understood the plight of the brickthrowing Parisian cabbies, consumers were instead being incited into these apps by eyewateringly low rates — rates only made possible by Uber aggressively subsidizing rides while they racked up yearly losses in the billions.
By the time Uber made its first annual profit in 2023, it had racked up over $31 billion in losses over its 14-year history, a financial strategy only kept afloat by the company’s debt and historical levels of equity investment. But profit was never the point of Uber’s strategy: They weren’t concerned with coloring their chart green at the end of the year because they were too busy entrenching their app and turning themselves into a verb.
It was only when Uber started rolling back its generosity that the facade surrounding our Garden of Eden began crumbling. The public could only watch as Uber unveiled arbitrary surge pricing, massive layoffs and, worst of all, plain old price rises. In fact, many of these changes came in no small part due to the company’s decision to go public, subjecting the company’s finances to much higher levels of scrutiny.
Once Uber became ubiquitous — just “the way” to get back from BWI — they were suddenly able to employ as predatory a pricing strategy as they wanted. This was the switch investors knew would happen eventually. But what does this story have to do with AI?
OpenAI and Anthropic are being raised in the same Silicon Valley tech startup world that Uber was. They get funding from the same institutional investors, and if their finances are anything to go by, these AI companies are following closely in their big brother’s footsteps — burning through enormous sums of money in pursuit of hegemony.
The issue is that even though the Silicon Valley investors’ growth-now, profit-later mindsets haven’t changed, the nature of the object they are speculating on has. Taking an Uber doesn’t drastically impede your ability to drive tomorrow, but using a chatbot to write essays makes us worse at writing essays writ large. Large language models (LLMs) deprive students of the process of thinking through their ideas, causing us to use less of our brain when writing. That is before considering generative AI’s dishonest use as a wholesale circumvention of learning assignments.
Cognitive tasks like learning and critical thinking are inherently difficult processes, but the point is that by struggling through them, we get better and better. AI strips humans of this opportunity, and yet, its use is becoming increasingly ubiquitous among students as early as elementary school.
The objective of Uber’s aggressive strategy wasn’t to eliminate entirely the concept of people driving themselves around. Imagine what the world would look like if we had sold our cars at the sight of Uber’s unbelievably cheap rides. Our school buses, subways and bikes tossed away for the convenience of rideshare startups? What would have happened once Uber became a public company and switched into their surge pricing, profit-making and fare raising mode?
We are living in the age of AI convenience now — the Garden is lush with ripe fruit. We ask LLMs to make our grocery lists, generate search summaries and regulate our emotions because we can and it's free.
But what’s free now will not always be free. The privileges we leverage to ease our cognitive load will not always be around. So what happens with OpenAI or Anthropic IPO and their C-suite flips the same switch Uber did? What happens when what we’re losing isn’t cars, but the very way we look at the world: our ability to use our brains?
By incorporating AI into our lives and workflows so deeply, we’re not just trusting AI companies with our cognition today. We’re trusting them with it indefinitely.
Is that a deal you’re willing to take?
Steve Wang is a sophomore from Missouri City, Texas majoring in Biomedical Engineering. He is an Arts and Entertainment Editor for The News-Letter.
