> The narrative is that automation will make all of these services cheap, so the "gig economy" jobs get lost regardless to autonomous vehicles and robotic hamburger makers, for example. Only then, do these companies come out on top -- and quite big if they can float until automated solutions exist. At least, that's the story these types of business tell to acquire funding.

This narrative never made sense to me. Buying all those autonomous vehicles and burger flippers is an enormous expense and comes with additional logistics complications such as maintenance. Even if autonomous vehicles were perfected tomorrow, transforming a company with little to no capex like Uber into a capex behemoth would take many years, tons of real-estate negotiations, construction, etc. I'm not convinced Uber could make this transition faster than Amazon could build and app and start parking a fleet of cars at its already-built distribution centres.