It's also unlocking economic value that was impossible to realize in the old model. If you're sitting around your house with nothing to do for an hour you can now earn money in ways you couldn't before.
DoorDash lobbies heavily against laws that would regulate labor, or classify its workers as “employees” and thus require they be covered by the minimal protections our country offers.
The question is what happens if these sorts of micro-contract work arrangements are outlawed... is the expectation that these businesses will instead hire these people full time, thus increasing full time employment?
Maybe, although it seems unlikely. These sorts of tasks aren't going to be worth most companies hiring someone to do it full time. Instead, the work simply won't be done and the business will just be a little less efficient and responsive.
The other alternative is that someone would start a specialized service providing each of these types of tasks, and hire full time workers to do the work, and then contract out the services directly.
Is that better for the workers? Maybe for some, they will have full time employment. But will they make more money? Maybe, but now there is a new company extracting profit, with overhead and all the related costs.
Is that a better world for the average person? I don't know. I just don't think the answer is as simple as saying DoorDash obviously makes it worse.
A lot of that is about medical insurance. Employers generally have to offer subsidized health plans to full-time employees. If we could break that policy linkage between employment and health plan coverage then it would reduce the importance of classifying workers as employees versus independent contractors.
If the politicians are bought out by evil DoorDash's lobbying, why don't the voters just vote the politicians out? Do you have any evidence of a politician voting against their constituents' interests for personal gain?
Ignoring the easy second line, the answer to the first line is: we have two political parties in the US. What if neither are doing what the voters want?
To be fair, it’s not really their fault that there are people who want to treat work that normally would be considered a way to pick up a few bucks during free time as a full time career.
Sure, go ahead and make fast food delivery a highly regulated line of work that pays $30/hour with benefits. Just don’t be surprised when it no longer becomes economically viable for DoorDash to continue operating.
In a certain Euroland country an analogous delivery company just awards the driver minimum hourly payment on certain agreed before hours if they're clearly working but circumstances had them earn less. Minimum wage requirements stifle nothing.
If only there was some other kind of employment model where people had regular shifts and they were paid consistently and transparently. Unfortunately I also do my office work by logging into an app at 6AM every day and bidding on a white collar job for a mystery amount of time and money
> Tasks and the new app are currently available in select places in the U.S., excluding California, New York City, Seattle and Colorado.
Anyone know why that is?
(Claude thinks it's because those places have gig worker protection laws such that "classifying Dashers as independent contractors for non-delivery work is most legally risky")
I have no idea but when reading the article my mind immediately went to businesses having dashers take photos of competing businesses as some type of weird crowdsourced corporate espionage.
Those jurisdictions stifle innovation. Thankfully, the vast majority of the US does not do that. Door Dashers in 99% of the US will now have a button to click that will put more money in their pockets. Very good!
It's right there in the article. An innovative idea in the field of distributed labor, enabled by technology is being launched in the 99% of the US that allows ideas to be tried freely. I'm happy to see it!
There was a startup that did this in the mid 2010s named Magic, but was just via SMS. I used it a few times to get random things done, and it was really useful when it was cheap, then it became mega expensive.
There's two seperate things DoorDash seems to be doing: "Tasks" in the physical world (taking photos of inventory on shelves, closing Waymo doors), and then some seperate app for training AI models.
As for Magic, they were an SMS-based virtual assistant. They still exist today. They went downhill. https://getmagic.com/
I wonder who can give tasks. And how do they combat potential abuse cases. Surely there is lot of tasks that can be exploited for more nefarious purposes. Or just simply exploiting those that would do the tasks.
So, Quri (2009, now part of Trax), which was the startup copy of Proctor & Gamble's retail intelligence operations. But now like a sponge for any AI budgets not earmarked for hardware.
Basically turning their delivery fleet into a crowdsourced data labeling workforce. Smart use of an existing network. The real question is whether dashers will still have jobs once the robots they're training are ready.
I had a terrible thought while out on a hike the other day. I'm almost loath to post it on HN because I worry some idiot is going to read it and think it's a good idea. On the other hand, if I thought of it, it's just a matter of time before someone else does.
Here is the idea: programmers may move to a DoorDash like model as well in the future. You may have full time employment but it will be at a much lower base salary than in the past.
Instead of working on "stories" you will work "contracts."
So someone wants feature X or system Y, that's a contract. You get paid on delivery.
Meaning, since it will become possible to build more complete / fleshed out things with enough requirements and so forth with the use of AI, the best programmers will really be the best 'coding drone operators.' Whoever can get the most jobs done in the shortest amount of time at the highest quality for the least tokens, they'll rule the roost.
Real compensation will then happen in terms of boosts to the base salary for getting contracts done, similar to how many execs are paid a low salary and then are expected to earn their keep by the bonuses and equity the earn for delivering results. (Yes, I know, delivering results, har har).
It's essentially mystery shopping. There's a pretty big disconnect between what a large corporate HQ thinks occurs at their stores and what actually occurs at their stores.
Funny to see how creatively tech marketing teams are spinning their push for a permanent underclass in America.
No employment contracts. No benefits. No protections. Unpredictable wages. But hey, it's great because in this new model people have "flexibility" and "freedom".
It's also appears to be a hustle side job employer in PR regarding employment MO, while clearly trying to capture the market for deliveries in weekday work hours.
If you haven’t figured it out by now the future of all work is transfer learning and encoding human action so that all possible action is mechanized and commoditized.
I’ve been obsessed with this problem for the better part of 20 years
The fact that we’re finally starting to see it realized is very exciting
It’d be nice if folks like yourself were equally obsessed with the systemic harms that would come about from solving or addressing this problem rather than charging full-speed ahead into the unknown at everyone else’s expense.
Problems aren’t solely technological in nature, nor are their impacts and solutions. Never forget the humans behind the models.
You should be concerned and not excited. This future might be near than we can imagine and we're just accelerating things without thinking about the consequences.
Labour getting ever-granular in the age of micro-loans and RentAHuman.
> "Dashers have a new way to earn on their own terms"
The classic meaning inversion of precariousness and lack of benefits as a virtue.
It's also unlocking economic value that was impossible to realize in the old model. If you're sitting around your house with nothing to do for an hour you can now earn money in ways you couldn't before.
"Earn money" most markets are so saturated with drivers, nobody is making above minimum wage.
"value"
Neither of these two things are something that DoorDash as a company can realistically do anything about.
DoorDash lobbies heavily against laws that would regulate labor, or classify its workers as “employees” and thus require they be covered by the minimal protections our country offers.
The question is what happens if these sorts of micro-contract work arrangements are outlawed... is the expectation that these businesses will instead hire these people full time, thus increasing full time employment?
Maybe, although it seems unlikely. These sorts of tasks aren't going to be worth most companies hiring someone to do it full time. Instead, the work simply won't be done and the business will just be a little less efficient and responsive.
The other alternative is that someone would start a specialized service providing each of these types of tasks, and hire full time workers to do the work, and then contract out the services directly.
Is that better for the workers? Maybe for some, they will have full time employment. But will they make more money? Maybe, but now there is a new company extracting profit, with overhead and all the related costs.
Is that a better world for the average person? I don't know. I just don't think the answer is as simple as saying DoorDash obviously makes it worse.
A lot of that is about medical insurance. Employers generally have to offer subsidized health plans to full-time employees. If we could break that policy linkage between employment and health plan coverage then it would reduce the importance of classifying workers as employees versus independent contractors.
If the politicians are bought out by evil DoorDash's lobbying, why don't the voters just vote the politicians out? Do you have any evidence of a politician voting against their constituents' interests for personal gain?
Ignoring the easy second line, the answer to the first line is: we have two political parties in the US. What if neither are doing what the voters want?
> Do you have any evidence of a politician voting against their constituents' interests for personal gain?
You have to be kidding.
In the current US political system, the hard part would be finding examples of a politician doing anything but.
To be fair, it’s not really their fault that there are people who want to treat work that normally would be considered a way to pick up a few bucks during free time as a full time career.
Sure, go ahead and make fast food delivery a highly regulated line of work that pays $30/hour with benefits. Just don’t be surprised when it no longer becomes economically viable for DoorDash to continue operating.
In a certain Euroland country an analogous delivery company just awards the driver minimum hourly payment on certain agreed before hours if they're clearly working but circumstances had them earn less. Minimum wage requirements stifle nothing.
If only there was some other kind of employment model where people had regular shifts and they were paid consistently and transparently. Unfortunately I also do my office work by logging into an app at 6AM every day and bidding on a white collar job for a mystery amount of time and money
I am pretty sure that DoorDash employs quite a few of people for their tasks at hand.
Notably not the people who actually make the company money, though.
> Tasks and the new app are currently available in select places in the U.S., excluding California, New York City, Seattle and Colorado.
Anyone know why that is?
(Claude thinks it's because those places have gig worker protection laws such that "classifying Dashers as independent contractors for non-delivery work is most legally risky")
Probably exactly that. Those places have minimum wage laws for gig workers.
I have no idea but when reading the article my mind immediately went to businesses having dashers take photos of competing businesses as some type of weird crowdsourced corporate espionage.
Those jurisdictions stifle innovation. Thankfully, the vast majority of the US does not do that. Door Dashers in 99% of the US will now have a button to click that will put more money in their pockets. Very good!
Pretty sure Task rabbit operates in said jurisdictions, so it's not that.
Piecemeal labor! Shift work! SRO’s! Unlicensed taxis!
I can't imagine what these innovators will come up with next.
Innovation in what exactly?
It's right there in the article. An innovative idea in the field of distributed labor, enabled by technology is being launched in the 99% of the US that allows ideas to be tried freely. I'm happy to see it!
There was a startup that did this in the mid 2010s named Magic, but was just via SMS. I used it a few times to get random things done, and it was really useful when it was cheap, then it became mega expensive.
I don't quite get how that would work. They were completing tasks to train models but via sms? Can you elaborate?
There's two seperate things DoorDash seems to be doing: "Tasks" in the physical world (taking photos of inventory on shelves, closing Waymo doors), and then some seperate app for training AI models.
As for Magic, they were an SMS-based virtual assistant. They still exist today. They went downhill. https://getmagic.com/
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34148402
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/magic
It is a VA firm.
Meta doesn’t even need to use this, they’re just going to be constantly recording all video and audio from those rayban glasses ;)
Smart move, Zuck.
I wonder who can give tasks. And how do they combat potential abuse cases. Surely there is lot of tasks that can be exploited for more nefarious purposes. Or just simply exploiting those that would do the tasks.
So, Quri (2009, now part of Trax), which was the startup copy of Proctor & Gamble's retail intelligence operations. But now like a sponge for any AI budgets not earmarked for hardware.
So they’re training a model
Interesting - same concept as Amazon Mechanical Turk when you could crowdsource tasks
Basically turning their delivery fleet into a crowdsourced data labeling workforce. Smart use of an existing network. The real question is whether dashers will still have jobs once the robots they're training are ready.
I had a terrible thought while out on a hike the other day. I'm almost loath to post it on HN because I worry some idiot is going to read it and think it's a good idea. On the other hand, if I thought of it, it's just a matter of time before someone else does.
Here is the idea: programmers may move to a DoorDash like model as well in the future. You may have full time employment but it will be at a much lower base salary than in the past.
Instead of working on "stories" you will work "contracts."
So someone wants feature X or system Y, that's a contract. You get paid on delivery.
Meaning, since it will become possible to build more complete / fleshed out things with enough requirements and so forth with the use of AI, the best programmers will really be the best 'coding drone operators.' Whoever can get the most jobs done in the shortest amount of time at the highest quality for the least tokens, they'll rule the roost.
Real compensation will then happen in terms of boosts to the base salary for getting contracts done, similar to how many execs are paid a low salary and then are expected to earn their keep by the bonuses and equity the earn for delivering results. (Yes, I know, delivering results, har har).
Congratulations, you invented Upwork!
So... contractors? I don't understand how what you're describing is any different.
Are they supposed to open the food in order to take photos of it?!
No, it's just an inventory check.
Neat product expansion. Isn’t this what store employees are already doing though? Maybe it’s more for building datasets.
i think it's just a formalization of this https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/waymo-is-paying-doordash-gig...
It's essentially mystery shopping. There's a pretty big disconnect between what a large corporate HQ thinks occurs at their stores and what actually occurs at their stores.
Its mystery shopping without any of those pesky minimum wage requirements
Definitely won't be abused by burglars, stalkers and spies.
Funny to see how creatively tech marketing teams are spinning their push for a permanent underclass in America.
No employment contracts. No benefits. No protections. Unpredictable wages. But hey, it's great because in this new model people have "flexibility" and "freedom".
It's also appears to be a hustle side job employer in PR regarding employment MO, while clearly trying to capture the market for deliveries in weekday work hours.
Introducing DoorDash Deskilling.
If you haven’t figured it out by now the future of all work is transfer learning and encoding human action so that all possible action is mechanized and commoditized.
I’ve been obsessed with this problem for the better part of 20 years
The fact that we’re finally starting to see it realized is very exciting
It’d be nice if folks like yourself were equally obsessed with the systemic harms that would come about from solving or addressing this problem rather than charging full-speed ahead into the unknown at everyone else’s expense.
Problems aren’t solely technological in nature, nor are their impacts and solutions. Never forget the humans behind the models.
What’s that look like in your mind?
You should be concerned and not excited. This future might be near than we can imagine and we're just accelerating things without thinking about the consequences.
What specific consequences are you anticipating?
Straight out of Black Mirror.