From a Guardian column by Paul Mason:

these battles between regulators and the rent-seeking monopolists who have hijacked the sharing economy are, in the long term, irrelevant. The attempt to drive down cab drivers’ wages and reduce their employment rights to zero are, in their own way, a last gasp of the 20th-century economic thinking.

Because soon there won’t need to be drivers at all. Given that there are 400,000 HGV drivers in the UK, that at least a quarter of Britain’s 2.5 million van drivers are couriers, and that there are 297,000 licensed taxi drivers – that is a big dent in male employment.

The most important question facing us is not whether Uber drivers should have employment rights (they should), but what to do in a world where automation begins to eradicate work. If we accept – as Oxford researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne stated in 2013 – that 47% of jobs are susceptible to automation, the most obvious problem is: how are people going to live?