The third way is that companies find hiring workers, with all their complaints and needs and desire for dignity, too inconvenient, so they replace them with things that have none of those.
Particularly relevant since this paper is primarily about ride hailing and delivery services.
Despite all the hand-wringing most claims to be able to do this seem pretty implausible at this stage. But for the sake of argument, assuming this happens, this is not different from the second scenario I've described. Of course, if there are no workers, one wonders how companies might find "consumers" against whom to price-discriminate, but with companies unilaterally and individually controlling both what people pay and are paid, the whole system of labor and consumption as a market is a fiction anyway. It's crazy that so many people seem to think that transformative technologies will both somehow replace all human labor and keep all present economic relations intact except for the ability of anyone to get a job, given how many economic choices have been made to center labor as the primary means by which people are supported. To reiterate, the options are prevent this nonsense through collective action (either in the form of a government or through other forms of coordination) or move to a more oppressive relationship between a tiny population of oligarchs and everyone else than the "labor market" that is ostensibly the way this economic relationship is currently arranged
For the ride hailing side of things, it's already happened; there is no question of plausibility. I've probably done 50 rides in 2024, and only two had human drivers.
And I'm sure that'll stay working in San Francisco as long as there's enough bribe money to cover pushing past the considerable concerns about safety in "edge cases." It's entirely possible that's forever, if nothing breaks up the current consolidation of power as described
Particularly relevant since this paper is primarily about ride hailing and delivery services.