Benjamin Valdez, a rideshare driver with Uber and Lyft in the Los Angeles area, used to drive seven days a week when the gig was more lucrative--but he says he makes far less per ride these days. When Valdez started driving, around nine years ago, he told me that he could earn anywhere from 60 to 85 to drive from West Hollywood to downtown Los Angeles at peak surge, a roughly 6-to-10-mile trip depending on the specific route. Now, if "the stars align," he can earn between 25 and 35 for the same trip. "It's gotten harder and harder to make money," he said. In recent years, rideshare drivers like Valdez have experienced shrinking incomes as the companies continue to increase their cut from each ride.

Stoke is announcing it has raised $15.5 million in a series A round of funding. The company, which offers a freelance management system (FMS) to help enterprises manage independent contractors, freelancers, consultants, agencies, and gig workers, will use the funds to build out engineering, product marketing, and sales, Stoke cofounder and CEO Shahar Erez told VentureBeat. In terms of the product itself, he says the company wants to expand its partner ecosystem for marketplaces with sources for talent, including improving the experience for sourcing and adding a greater variety of sourcing capabilities. The company will also work toward launching global compliance for classification, rounding out compliance offerings for the U.S. and some European countries that Erez said are now "pretty solidified." In March, Stoke launched its Worker Classification Engine, an AI-powered system that analyzes companies' relationships with contractors and freelancers and alerts them to potentially costly compliance risks.

Day after day, Walter Diaz, an immigrant truck driver from El Salvador, steers his 18-wheeler toward the giant ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Will it take him a half hour to pick up his cargo? Or will it be as long as seven hours? Diaz is paid by the load, so he applauds the arrival of more waterfront robots, which promise to speed turnaround times at a port complex that handles about a third of the nation's imported goods. "I'm for automation," Diaz says.

Science fiction has long imagined a future in which humans constantly interact with robots and intelligent machines. This future is already happening in warehouses and manufacturing businesses. Other workers use virtual or augmented reality as part of their employment training, to assist them in performing their job or to interact with clients. And lots of workers are under automated surveillance from their employers. All that automation yields data that can be used to analyze workers' performance.

Some Uber drivers in New York City want to see a decrease in the commission taken by the company. SAN FRANCISCO -- Gig economy workers are increasingly ubiquitous, shuttling us to appointments and delivering our food while working for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and others. Thanks in large part to the app-based tech boom emanating from this city, 36% of U.S. workers participate in the gig economy, according to Gallup. But not all gigs are created equal, Gallup adds, noting that so-called "contingent gig workers" experience their workplace "like regular employees do, just without the benefits of a traditional job -- benefits, pay and security." California lawmakers are weighing what is considered a pro-worker bill that, if passed into law, would set a national precedent that fundamentally redefines the relationship between worker and boss by forcing corporations to pay up.

NEW YORK - Uber is set for its Wall Street debut Friday, with a massive share offering that is a milestone for the ride-hailing industry and the so-called sharing economy but which comes with simmering concerns about its business model. Shares will be priced at $45 for the initial public offering, valuing the startup at more than $82 billion, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. San Francisco-based Uber was set to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the eponymous ticker "UBER" in one of the technology sector's largest IPOs. Despite the eye-popping valuation, Uber dialed back some of its earlier ambitions for a value exceeding $100 billion after the rocky start seen by U.S. ride-share rival Lyft Inc. Analyst Daniel Ives of Wedbush Securities said Uber has the potential to be a game-changing company and "is paving a similar road to what Amazon did to transform retail/ecommerce and Facebook did for social media." Uber has the potential to grow, Ives said, as it morphs its ride-sharing platform into a more diverse set of services, with Uber Eats, Uber Freight and self-driving vehicle initiatives.

Silicon Valley's use of nontraditional employment arrangements, where workers typically aren't afforded the same privileges as employees, has grown faster than full-time jobs, even as tech giants come under fire for their treatment of Uber drivers, Google cafeteria workers, or Facebook content moderators. But after sustained protest from contractors and employees, Google said Tuesday it will require outside companies that supply it labor to offer better working conditions, including comprehensive health care, 12 weeks of parental leave, and a $15-per-hour minimum wage. Google's policy change arrives amid a wider reckoning over Silicon Valley's impact, from income inequality to workers rights. Last week, thousands of Uber drivers protested an abrupt move to cut per-mile fares by 25 percent, as the company prepares to go public; that was followed by an anonymous letter from an Uber engineer urging employees to support drivers. Days before Lyft's IPO, a California lawmaker declined to exempt Uber, Lyft, and other gig-economy tech companies from a bill that would limit employers' use of independent contractors and force them to classify more workers as employees, making them eligible for overtime, Social Security, unemployment, disability insurance, and other benefits.

Lyft's entire business model is predicated on its relationship with its drivers. It hinges on recruiting them, keeping them happy, ensuring the company never has to provide them health insurance and other benefits, and eventually finding a way to replace some of them with self-driving cars so Lyft can keep a bigger chunk of the check after every ride. Unfortunately for Lyft there is great uncertainty at each juncture of that driver relationship. In filings last week initiating a planned initial public stock offering, Lyft -- which lost $911.3 million on $2.2 billion in revenue in 2018 -- acknowledged it may never become profitable. That's due in part to both long-standing limitations and new external threats that have left Lyft's relationship with its drivers in flux.

People in the tech world love to say that everybody should learn to code -- and there are a lot of good reasons to pick up the trade: earn a higher salary, understand the implications of A.I. and cybersecurity, protect yourself from automation. While wages have been stagnant, there has been consistent growth of high-paying jobs in software (for now). Despite all the incentives bringing people into programming and other technology fields, we actually need more people willing to break out of it. Don't get me wrong: I teach computer science and computer programming. I believe wholeheartedly in the power of technology to improve lives.

Cheng Wei, chairman and chief executive officer of Beijing Xiaoju Keji Didi Dache Co., speaks during the 4th World Internet Conference on Dec. 3, 2017 in Wuzhen, China. Hail a ride from DiDi Chuxing (China's version of Uber) and you're likely to be picked up by an ordinary person driving any one of China's dozens of mass production passenger cars. Expect the driver to be yammering away on the phone, while a good luck charm--likely a Daoist eternal knot--swings from the rearview mirror. But order a ride from DiDi's Premier service, and a dark-suited chauffer will show up in a polished luxury sedan, most likely a black Volkswagen Lamando. Complimentary bottles of own-label DiDi Premier mineral water await.