Thought autonomous vehicles were the near future? Have you considered exploiting workers virtually instead?
Obviously this has some glaring flaws on the surface level, but I'm just sitting here wondering which lucky so called "third world" country gets the first contract to virtually drive American streets for a dollar an hour. Oops, internet lagged a bit, and your uber driver just drove into the delta, sorry bud.
This has been a long time coming. Starsky Robotics was using remote drivers to fill in the gaps of their driverless semi-trucks like 3 years ago. Just wait till VR and telerobotics allow us to "bid for opportunities" to take over control of humanoid robotics when they find themselves in situations their neural nets can't handle. It'll totally be like a virtual mechanical turk.