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Here's that cyberpunk future you ordered.
Seriously though "e-bike load-balancing grifter" is a job description right out of Snow Crash.
More than likely its some ex-programmer for the company who wrote or worked on the algo and just let someone else have it.
I kind of hate it in the same way I really despise hackers/exploiters in online multiplayer games. Yes yes, very clever, you're technically staying within the confines of the rules as defined by the computer code, but any other player can tell you that isn't how they intended to play the game and it ruins the point for them, can you spare any thought for that?
Sure, maybe the game dev/Lyft can update the code and fix things to be less hackable. But in the meantime you're making everything subtly (or not so subtly) worse for everyone.
Grumble grumble low trust society grumble grumble
ON THE OTHER HAND. I'm also not a fan of gamification intended to save a company money by offloading labor to users by using incentives that explicitly aim to change their behavior patterns. At least this one pays out actual money rather than amorphous reward points or 'achievements' that have no intrinsic value.
Ultimately it is impossible to make any system that is even slightly complex 'perfect.' There are always weird edge cases, and always tons of people motivated to find and exploit those edge cases until the weakness is patched. Either you foster a level of social trust high enough that people will intentionally not exploit these loopholes (and indeed, will be white-hats and report them on sight!) OR you can have a society that is wealthy enough that these niche 'parasites' aren't worth addressing.
Me, I would never even consider this kind of approach to making money (unless I was truly desperate) because there is absolutely nothing about it that is fulfilling to me, and I'd be very acutely aware that I'm basically imposing an externality on other users of the bikes.
But I understand and mostly accept that there are people who get a lot of 'fulfillment' out of finding out ways to exploit systems and 'get one over' on the powers that be and for them the mere knowledge that they're getting away with an unintended boon is probably enough motivation to do it. They like this better than being a sucker with a 9-5.
And they have a role in society too. It doesn't do to have your entire society simply ignore weaknesses in their critical systems because everyone is too polite and honest to comment on them, and thus vulnerabilities can persist until a catastrophe emerges.
And at least in theory this type of person, it must be said, might still end up contributing quite a lot. A very significant number of big tech players in the early internet era got their start as phone phreakers, scamming the phone companies in a sort of similar way.
Yeah.
My preference for a high trust society isn't because I want all systems to be designed naively so that they only work if everyone does things the specific way and break as soon as people start doing things to exploit the system.
Its more like I want everyone to have a shared goal of keeping systems intact AND in generally improving them over time, rather than breaking them for immediate personal gain.
Phone phreakers weren't causing much damage (that I'm aware of), and the personal gain was minimal.
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