To Uber or not to Uber - that is NOT the question.

Everyone has them. Moments when they realise they were / are wrong. Moments that form in the brain, when several synapses to their thing and shock us into a new thought / or a new realisation.

One of those happened to me this morning, just now, whilst I was reading a blog by Seth Godin about the future of self driving cars and in passing about what role Uber might play in this.

You see for a while I have been very much anti Uber (the American tech leviathan which will destroy the taxi industry - that we at Justaxi the Manchester taxi comparison app were trying to save.)

One of the reasons I was against them is ideologically and another political and very sensible.

The first - is that should we really be building tech which simply replaces industries so that someone somewhere can make more money.

The leveling of the market place being great for those that profit from it, giving them (but no one else) more and more money.

The second - is that Uber and many of their like i.e. massive billion pound corporations that use clever tech to make even more money, pay their shareholders millions, and ruin small parts of the

economy - do so without paying much (or any tax) to the places their are exploiting  i.e. Uber will take billions out of the UK economy and not pay as much tax here as many would like or see as fair like many others like Amazon etc.

As Amazon, bless it, over the last four years, Amazon has generated £23bn in British sales - how much does it pay in tax? Around £10m through corporation tax in a decade. 

According to the Guardian, the £4.2m Amazon paid in tax in 2013 is just 0.1% of Amazon's UK revenues in 2013. For the whole piece and more about figures - read here. 

The tax argument is therefore a good one. But the reason for my change of mind / heart is nothing to do with now or with tax but with the future and which version of it I would rather we got.

In Seth's Blog he puts it this way

"Like all innovations, the death of the non-autonomous vehicle is not all upside. The car industry gets mostly commodified, jobs are shifted and disruptions occur. Privacy for teenagers, ordinary citizens and bank-robbers-making-an-escape disappears. The suburbs become even less attractive to some people. But just as you can't imagine a city scene where just about everyone isn't looking at their smart phone and swarming in the virtual cloud, it's going to be a whole new cityscape once cars retreat from their spot at the top of the attention/command chain.
One way this might happen: Certain models will be labeled as Uber-compatible (or whatever network is in place). Buy that car and with a few clicks, the car starts earning its keep. When you're at work or asleep or otherwise engaged, it moonlights and drives other folks around. The combination of security cameras in your car and rider registration pretty much guarantees that your car isn't going to come back wrecked. It's not hard to imagine organizations building fleets to profit from this (a medallion replacement) but it also becomes economically irresistible to the individual as well."

Now suddenly the whole thing makes sense. The end game comes in sight. 

Which is one that I rather like. The idea that your car can make money for you, be shared by people, you can become the taxi company, you can make money yourself from the outlay of transporational expense. Now that end game seems a lot more social - almost socialist... i.e. the means of production is placed purely and surely in the hands of the worker (e.g. us.)

Whether or not it is Uber that runs the network or Google (who owns half of it by the by) is really not important.  

What is important is that I realise that the end game might have to be worth the problems of today.

Oh and thanks to Tom Auld, a good and old friend of mine, who started my realisation with a good old fashioned discussion over a beer or three last weekend. He started bending my thoughts with some solid reasoning. Seth just did the rest. Uber aint that bad after all - now if we could just get them to pay tax in the UK.  

Which is a decision that we all would take with the government. If they ever let us.