The taxi industry bribed politicians to create taxi cartels and eliminate competition. I have no sympathy for them.
The thing is, innovations happen all the time. The process never changes - innovations look strange at first, people reject them. Then people get accustomed and then they cannot understand how did they live previously, without these things.
The bad side, however, is that Internet era made things much faster. It usually took a generation to adapt to changes, but nowadays changes happen very quickly and people are just overwhelmed.
Could you imagine smartphones 20 years ago? and can you imagine you life without them now? I do not say it's impossible, but teens already tend to spend more time with their phones than with their friends, and the next generation will spend even less time communicating verbally.
Driverless cars will become a norm in many countries in the near future - a decade or two and millions of truck drivers, taxi drivers, limo drivers, bus drivers - all of them will lose their jobs.
Doctor Watson system is being tested and if it proves its usefulness - a lot of doctors will lose their jobs or face fiersome competition, not to mention lower-qualified medical personnel.
This happened all of the time throughout history - innovations killed previous industries, but they opened new possibilities and new markets. Electricity replaced oil-fired lamps and quantity of whaleboats reduced by 85%. Thousands of sailors lost their jobs and had to adapt. The same goes with locomotives and horses (and using horses included various industries - production and maintenance of coaches, huge demand for horseshoes, saddles, etc.). And then locomotives were replaced by electric trains, now with maglevs and God knows what will emerge in the future. A lot of people lost their jobs and had to adapt.
This is the key. When an industry crashes - people lose jobs and have to adapt. The bad thing is that too many innovations emerged as of late - and they keep appearing.
Therefore, in some time - maybe a couple of years, maybe a decade, maybe two - hundreds of millions all over the world will lose their jobs. This will cause huge social crisis, because governments cannot provide enough new jobs today, and I highly doubt populists of the future will be better at this.
Thus said, these people are merely Luddits - they fail to adapt to changes and try to stop innovations by crashing cars. They can't do anything, unfortunately.
