September 2, 2026
The robotaxi may be an extraordinary technological achievement. That does not automatically make replacing the person behind the wheel human progress.
By the InnerKwest Editorial Desk
You open an app because you need a ride.
A destination is entered. A price appears. A vehicle is selected.
Increasingly, another choice may appear alongside the familiar one: a vehicle with a human being behind the wheel, or an autonomous vehicle capable of making the journey without one.
InnerKwest has a simple request.
When you have a reasonable choice, consider choosing the human driver.
Not because autonomous vehicles must be banned.
Not because technology should stop developing.
And certainly not because every existing job must somehow be preserved forever regardless of changing circumstances.
Consider the human because something much larger is taking place inside that seemingly insignificant decision.
We are being asked, transaction by transaction, industry by industry, to accept an assumption that deserves far more scrutiny than it has received:
If technology can remove a human being from an economic activity, doing so represents progress.
Does it?
That question has become particularly visible as autonomous rideshare services expand.
In Atlanta, union official Liza Ramsey has proposed what has been described as a robotaxi impact fee of roughly 50 cents to $1 per autonomous ride. The proceeds would support a driver transition fund providing training, grants and other assistance for workers displaced by automation. The union has also sought restrictions on robotaxi pickups at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Ramsey summarized the underlying argument plainly: if corporations profit by replacing human workers with automation, they should contribute toward helping those workers find their next opportunity.
There will be legitimate arguments about whether such a fee is good policy, whether airport restrictions are justified, how transition programs should operate and whether consumers should bear any portion of those costs.
But before debating the remedy, perhaps we should spend more time examining the condition requiring the remedy.
Why are we discussing a transition fund in the first place?
Because everyone involved already understands what the technology is capable of doing.
It can remove the driver.
And once the driver is removed, the economic value previously flowing through that person has to go somewhere else.
That doesn’t make autonomous transportation inherently wrong. It does, however, make the word progress considerably more complicated.
The Machine Advanced. Did We?
Imagine an invention capable of carrying a physically able person everywhere they wanted to go.
No more walking.
The machine is faster than walking. More convenient. Perhaps safer under certain circumstances. It operates in bad weather. It saves time. Engineers continuously improve it until there is virtually no practical reason for its owner to use their legs for transportation again.
Technologically, the achievement could be remarkable.
But something else would happen.
Stop using muscles long enough and they weaken.
Eventually they atrophy.
Would we point toward the increasingly sophisticated machine and declare the entire development human progress while ignoring what was happening to the person using it?
Probably not.
We would understand instinctively that the advancement of the machine and the advancement of the human are two different measurements.
Yet our economic conversations increasingly blur precisely that distinction.
Innovation becomes efficiency.
Efficiency becomes advancement.
Advancement gets renamed progress.
And once something has been declared progress, questioning it can make the questioner sound as though they are standing against the future itself.
That is intellectually convenient.
It is not necessarily true.
Technology can advance while human capability deteriorates.
The calculator can become better while arithmetic skills weaken.
Navigation systems can become more accurate while people’s ability to navigate independently diminishes.
Artificial intelligence can become more capable while humans surrender intellectual tasks they once exercised themselves.
And an economy can become astonishingly productive while progressively reducing the number of human beings required to participate in producing that value.
There is a word for capacity lost through lack of use.
Atrophy.
Perhaps we should begin contemplating its economic equivalent.
Economic Atrophy
A rideshare driver is easy to describe as someone who drives people from one location to another.
Economically, however, something more significant is happening.
The driver possesses or controls an asset. The driver makes time available. The driver provides a service. Another person voluntarily purchases that service. Income is generated.
For many people, rideshare driving has become one of the remaining relatively accessible ways of converting personal effort and an available asset into immediate economic activity.
It may supplement a salary.
It may bridge unemployment.
It may help pay tuition.
It may supplement retirement income.
It may finance another business.
It may simply allow someone to decide, I need additional income this week, and I have a way to go earn it.
That last sentence deserves attention.
Because that is independence.
Not complete independence from an economic system. The platforms themselves obviously exercise enormous control over access, pricing and distribution.
But there remains something profoundly human in the proposition:
I can perform something another person values, and through that exchange I can earn.
Now remove the person.
The transportation service remains.
The passenger still travels.
The platform still operates.
The payment still occurs.
The economic activity hasn’t disappeared.
The human participation has.
Where does the portion of economic value that previously supported the driver go?
Some may eventually appear as lower fares. Some will finance extraordinarily expensive autonomous systems, infrastructure and maintenance. Some may become corporate margin. Some may flow toward engineers, technicians, investors and entirely new occupations.
Those outcomes matter.
But simply assuming that displaced economic participation will somehow reappear elsewhere is not analysis.
It is a promise.
And promises of future opportunity deserve evidence.
Show where displaced drivers go.
Show whether replacement occupations exist in comparable numbers.
Show whether the people displaced can realistically qualify for them.
Show whether those opportunities provide comparable income and independence.
Show how productivity gains are distributed.
And show that an economy requiring progressively fewer ordinary people to produce its enormous output remains capable of providing those same people meaningful ways to participate in the prosperity being created.
These are not arguments against technology.
They are questions about humans.
America Has Seen a Version of This Movie Before
There is another reason the United States should hesitate before assuming that every reduction in labor cost represents an uncomplicated economic victory.
For decades, American corporations discovered that enormous amounts of production could be performed more cheaply somewhere else.
Factories moved.
Supply chains stretched around the world.
Consumers gained access to inexpensive goods. Corporations improved efficiencies. Global trade expanded dramatically.
There were genuine benefits.
But America eventually discovered that it hadn’t merely transferred factory jobs overseas.
In many cases it had transferred productive ecosystems.
Tooling.
Suppliers.
Industrial knowledge.
Apprenticeships.
Skilled trades.
Engineering experience.
Local tax bases.
Manufacturing communities.
And portions of the national capability required to manufacture strategically important things.
Once those ecosystems disappeared, rebuilding them proved considerably harder than dismantling them.
Alexander Hamilton understood the larger principle more than two centuries ago.
National wealth could not be reduced merely to having enough money to purchase what other countries produced. Productive capacity itself mattered. Manufacturing capability mattered. Skills mattered. Economic independence mattered.
That insight has returned with force as the United States attempts to rebuild semiconductor manufacturing, secure critical supply chains and restore domestic industrial capacity.
But there is a strange possibility emerging.
America could successfully bring production home without bringing human economic participation home with it.
The factory returns.
The robots operate it.
Artificial intelligence manages portions of it.
Autonomous systems move its materials.
Algorithms schedule its logistics.
Driverless vehicles transport its products.
The productive capacity has technically been reshored.
But where is the worker?
We may discover that the next great economic question isn’t simply whether America manufactures things again.
It is whether Americans remain meaningfully necessary to the economy America is rebuilding.
The Dollar Cannot Solve Everything Either
America’s extraordinary financial power helped make the earlier arrangement possible.
The dollar became the central currency of global commerce and finance. American consumers could purchase enormous quantities of foreign production while American financial markets attracted capital from around the world.
Washington also discovered that control over dollar-centered financial infrastructure provided extraordinary geopolitical leverage.
Sanctions became increasingly powerful.
Access to financial networks became an instrument of foreign policy.
But power creates incentives for those subjected to it.
Countries facing the possibility of exclusion naturally begin exploring alternatives: local-currency settlement, bilateral payment arrangements, gold accumulation and financial infrastructure designed to reduce exposure to American leverage.
None of this means the dollar is about to disappear as the world’s dominant reserve currency.
It does mean something simpler.
Dependence creates vulnerability.
America discovered that after becoming dependent upon overseas manufacturing.
Other countries understand it when contemplating dependence upon American financial infrastructure.
And individuals understand it instinctively when thinking about their own livelihoods.
Economic independence matters.
Which brings us back to the driver.
What Happens When the Robotaxi Picks Up the Robot?
There is an almost absurd endpoint to this conversation.
An autonomous vehicle leaves a highly automated factory.
An algorithm dispatches it.
No driver sits behind the wheel.
It travels to an automated distribution facility.
Robotic systems load cargo.
Artificial intelligence manages the inventory.
Another autonomous system receives the shipment.
Machines diagnose other machines.
Algorithms transact with algorithms.
Eventually we arrive at the ridiculous-sounding question:
What happens when the autonomous vehicle is picking up the robot?
Technologically, such a system could be magnificent.
Its productivity might have astonished every previous generation.
But economics ultimately exists to serve human civilization.
So somewhere inside that breathtaking machine ecosystem remains an embarrassingly basic question:
Where are the people?
More importantly:
How are they participating?
Capitalism is extraordinarily effective at discovering efficiencies.
If one worker can produce what previously required ten workers, competition strongly encourages someone to discover how.
If production can move somewhere cheaper, capital tends to find the cheaper location.
If software can replace administrative labor, someone will build the software.
If artificial intelligence can perform work previously requiring professionals, someone will sell that capability.
If the driver can be removed from the car, somebody will remove the driver.
But the mechanism capable of answering Can we eliminate this cost? is not necessarily capable of answering Should human beings surrender this role?
Those are different questions.
And markets alone should not be expected to settle every question concerning human purpose, dignity, independence and participation.
When They Come for You
It is remarkably easy to accept displacement when the person being displaced works somewhere else, in another industry, doing something we have never done. For years, that distance made automation easier to discuss as an abstraction. The factory worker lost a position overseas. The cashier disappeared behind a self-checkout terminal. Travel agents, warehouse workers and customer-service representatives watched pieces of their occupations migrate to software and machines. Today, the rideshare driver finds the same question arriving at the driver’s door.
But the distance between their work and our work is rapidly disappearing.
Automation is moving well beyond the factory floor and into professions that once seemed protected by education, credentials, creativity or specialized knowledge. Accountants are watching software perform increasingly sophisticated financial work. Programmers are watching systems write code. Attorneys are seeing machines analyze documents that once required hours of professional review. Writers, designers, financial analysts, teachers and physicians are encountering technologies capable of performing portions of work that only recently seemed inseparable from human expertise.
None of this proves that those professions will disappear. Nobody can responsibly make that claim.
It does prove that technological displacement can no longer be dismissed as something that happens primarily to someone else.
That should change the way we think about the person behind the wheel of a rideshare vehicle. Before celebrating the removal of another human being from an economic transaction, perhaps we should consider how the same reasoning sounds when applied to our own livelihood.
What are you going to do when they come for you—and your independence?
Because ultimately this is about more than preserving a job title. Economic independence rests partly on our ability to convert something distinctly ours—knowledge, labor, creativity, judgment, experience, skill or physical capability—into something another person values enough to pay for.
It is the simple but powerful proposition: I can do something useful, therefore I have a means to earn.
If enough of those economically valuable human capabilities are steadily transferred to machines, the question eventually becomes larger than how many jobs automation creates or eliminates. We will have to confront what happens to economic agency itself when an economy becomes increasingly capable of functioning without the participation of large numbers of the people who live within it.
That question cannot be answered by another demonstration of what the technology can do.
We already know the technology can be extraordinary.
The question InnerKwest is asking is what happens to us.
So InnerKwest Is Asking Something Small
The next time you request a ride, you may have a choice.
One vehicle may arrive without a driver.
Another may arrive with someone sitting behind the wheel.
There may be circumstances when the autonomous choice makes sense to you.
That remains your choice.
InnerKwest isn’t asking government to make that decision for you.
We are asking you to consider what your decision means.
Behind that wheel may be someone supplementing a paycheck.
Someone between jobs.
Someone paying tuition.
Someone trying to start a business.
Someone supporting a family.
Someone who simply decided that rather than asking somebody else for money, they would go out and earn some.
You don’t have to know their story.
You don’t have to romanticize them.
You don’t even have to have a conversation with them.
Simply recognize what is happening.
One transaction keeps another human being participating in the economy.
The other demonstrates that the transaction can occur without them.
If the difference in convenience and cost is reasonable, consider choosing the human.
Not out of pity.
Out of recognition.
Because an economy isn’t something happening somewhere above us on Wall Street, in Washington, inside Silicon Valley laboratories or across massive data centers.
We create it every day through millions of individual decisions about where our money goes and whose participation we value.
There is nothing primitive about deciding that human participation itself has value.
There is nothing inevitable about defining its elimination as progress.
The machine may be advancing spectacularly.
The more important question is whether the human condition is advancing with it.
And before we allow another human economic function to atrophy through disuse, perhaps we should exercise it while we still can.
Today, someone is sitting behind that wheel willing to earn your business.
Tomorrow, someone may be deciding whether there is still any economic reason for a human being to do what you do.
When you have the choice, consider choosing the human.
Because sooner or later, almost everyone may have reason to hope that somebody does the same for them.
At InnerKwest.com, we are committed to delivering impactful journalism, deep insights, and fearless social commentary. Your cryptocurrency contributions help us execute with excellence, ensuring we remain independent and continue to amplify voices that matter.
To help sustain our work and editorial independence, we would appreciate your support of any amount of the tokens listed below. Support independent journalism:
BTC: 3NM7AAdxxaJ7jUhZ2nyfgcheWkrquvCzRm
SOL: HxeMhsyDvdv9dqEoBPpFtR46iVfbjrAicBDDjtEvJp7n
ETH: 0x3ab8bdce82439a73ca808a160ef94623275b5c0a
XRP: rLHzPsX6oXkzU2qL12kHCH8G8cnZv1rBJh TAG – 1068637374
SUI – 0xb21b61330caaa90dedc68b866c48abbf5c61b84644c45beea6a424b54f162d0c
and through our Support Page.
InnerKwest maintains a revelatory and redemptive discipline, relentless in advancing parity across every category of the human experience.
© 2026 InnerKwest®. All Rights Reserved | Haki zote zimehifadhiwa | 版权所有. InnerKwest® is a registered trademark of Inputit™ Platforms Inc. Global. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Thank you for standing with us in pursuit of truth and progress!