Janeese Lewis George, a D.C. councilmember and the city's presumptive next mayor, has come out against pending legislation that would allow autonomous ride-share vehicles onto city streets, citing the technology's potential to eliminate the jobs of ride-share human drivers. 

"DC is facing a jobs crisis. Rushing the legalization of autonomous vehicles is irresponsible given the anticipated AI-related job displacement and disruptions that put countless workers at risk," she said on X yesterday.  

DC is facing a jobs crisis.

Rushing the legalization of autonomous vehicles is irresponsible given the anticipated AI-related job displacement and disruptions that put countless workers at risk.

— Janeese Lewis George (@Janeese4DC) October 15, 2026

In a follow-up post, she said that the D.C. Council should delay consideration of a pending bill that would allow Waymo, which is currently testing its technology with human safety operators on District streets, to offer autonomous rides to the public.  

Ever since Lewis George won a commanding victory in D.C.'s Democratic mayoral primary earlier this year, pundits and wonks have been trying to read the tea leaves on how the Democratic Socialist will govern. 

D.C.'s economy is currently in a rough spot. Unemployment is high. The housing market is down. Population growth is slowing.  

Lewis George's comments about Waymo suggest the mayor has a deeply mistaken view about the effects and benefits of technological innovation. Contrary to her contention, Waymo legalization is unlikely to exacerbate a "jobs crisis" for at least three reasons. 

The first reason she's wrong is that very few D.C. residents work full-time as ride-share drivers. On her Capital Commonsense Substack, Ashley Schapitl reports that, by Lewis George's own estimate, there are only 200 District residents who work full-time as ride-share drivers.

For comparison's sake, the District has a labor force of roughly 400,000 people. So even if Waymo displaced all human drivers in the District, it would be a statistical nonevent. 

Few headlines, for instance, reported that D.C.'s labor force shrank by 1,000 people between May and June. Neither did many outlets report that the labor force grew by roughly 600 people between July and August. 

Yet here the mayor is talking about a "jobs crisis" over what would be an even smaller change in the number of employed workers in the city. 

The second reason not to fear an exacerbated "jobs crisis" as a result of Waymo legalization is that autonomous vehicles (A.V.s) will not completely replace human rideshare drivers in the foreseeable future. 

In the cities where Waymo has been active for years, A.V.s are still responsible for a minority of rideshare rides. 

That's the case in Phoenix, where Waymo has been offering autonomous commercial service since 2020. In an article from April, Business Insider cites one study that put Waymo's market share at 16 percent of ride-share rides. 

In other words, 84 percent of ride-share rides are still being performed by humans a full six years after A.V.s came onto the scene. 

That isn't to say the impacts of A.V.s are necessarily positive for human drivers' earnings.

Another study by Gridwise from August 2025 found that A.V.s appeared to be marginally reducing drivers' hourly pay and number of trips per hour. That's evidence of the market for rides becoming more competitive, but it's not, as of yet, evidence of a job apocalypse. 

Network design matters too. In places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Waymo is a standalone competitor to traditional ride-share companies like Uber and Lyft. In Austin and Phoenix, Waymo partners with Uber to offer rides on hybrid human-and-A.V. networks. 

A report by EnoTrans, funded by a grant from Lyft, found that the later cities' hybrid networks actually increased human drivers' trips per hour. Their pay-per-hour fell, albeit less steeply than in cities without hybrid networks. 

All of that is to say that while Waymo, as a competitor to human-operated ride-share services, shouldn't be expected to have a positive impact on drivers' earnings. It shouldn't be expected to have a catastrophic impact on them either. 

The third and final reason that Lewis George is wrong to think that Waymo will worsen a coming "jobs crisis" is that Waymo's employment impacts are not limited to its effect on competing human drivers. 

If Waymo earns any market share at all, it'll be because it's offering some travelers a better transportation option than the ones that currently exist. Increased ease of travel within the city would be expected to raise employment levels, not lower them. 

If Waymo makes it easier or cheaper for people to get from home to the office or from the office to their kids' school, they might be more willing to live in D.C. over Arlington or Silver Spring. If it's more convenient to get to the movies or dinner, residents will be more willing to patronize local businesses. 

None of that even touches on the economic and human benefits of Waymo's likely positive impact on road safety. 

The direct effects of Waymo on drivers' employment must be weighed against all the other economic activity that autonomous vehicles will facilitate. 

In the long run, the economic effects of autonomous vehicles may well be revolutionary. In the foreseeable future, they'll make the market for for-hire rides slightly more competitive. 

A reasonable assumption then is that Waymo will have a modest, but positive, impact on overall economic activity and employment in the District, even if it has a modest, but negative, impact on the small number of full-time ride-share drivers who live here. 

If the new mayor can't even tolerate that level of economic disruption, that does not portend good things for D.C.'s economy under a Lewis George administration. 

The post Presumptive D.C. Mayor Janeese Lewis George Demands Halt to Waymo Legalization To Protect Drivers' Jobs appeared first on Reason Magazine.

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• OpenAI's Alexander Embiricos said the AI era gives a choice: work more, or work less.
• He's in charge of Dots, the company's new always-on work assistant.
• AI is often pitched as freeing up time. Embiricos responded to the idea that it might add more work.

As the competitive AI race pushes tech workers into long hours, the head of OpenAI's new Dots product says AI gives people another option: work a whole lot less.

Alexander Embiricos, who leads OpenAI's enterprise product and helms the new Dots agent tool, told a crowd at TechCrunch's Disrupt conference on Thursday that AI's capabilities have created something of a fork in the road for workers. You can grind to meet the moment. Or you can use AI to kick your feet up a little.

"We basically have a lot more choice now," he said.

Embiricos made the comments after a reporter asked about when AI systems will actually deliver more free time. The reporter shared an anecdote where an OpenAI employee used a ChatGPT mobile feature to work in their car and on a plane — not exactly liberated by the new tech.

Embiricos said that the moment has already arrived where a worker can "outsource" tasks to AI and do less work. Then again, some people are so excited about AI's potential that they feel like it's an "interesting, ripe moment" to put in extra hours.

"I think that's why a lot of people are motivated to work very hard right now. That includes myself," he said. "But I think actually there is this choice, and there's totally this other setup where you could delegate a ton more things."

OpenAI is billing its Dots tool as a workplace assistant, always on and capable of proactively handing tasks and sorting to-dos. Embiricos uses his Dot often in Slack, he said, engaging on various threads.

His perspective illustrates how early companies are in their journey to adopt AI tools. Most companies have not yet automated their work tasks, and many workers are still debating how much to use the tools. Early AI adopters, meanwhile, can sprint through some work that used to take days or weeks, especially in software engineering.

Embiricos summed up the situation he feels workers are in: "You either choose: do you expand the ambition of what you can do, or do you do less? I do think we're there."

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at scouncil@businessinsider.com, or over text, Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 415-757-8198. Use a personal email address, a non-work WiFi network, and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

Dwarkesh Patel on what the public doesn’t know about A.I.

© The New York Times

So-called educated unemployment is rising today in Chile among people with completed university or technical-professional training, an academic study revealed.

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In 2010, only 21.7% of the labor force had graduated from a higher education institution, a share that climbed to 42.1 out of every 100 by 2026, according to a report by the Economic Context Observatory of Diego Portales University (OCEC-UDP).

That means more qualified workers and higher productivity potential, but it does not mean greater chances of landing a job.

The National Institute of Statistics reported that in the June-August mobile quarter, the open unemployment rate reached 9.6%, with 44 consecutive months above eight percentage points.

RELATED: Chilean University Rectors Reject Education Cuts in 2027 Budget Bill

Among those who completed university or successfully completed technical-professional training, unemployment is also a serious problem, the OCEC-UDP said. It rose one point in the last 12 months to 8.3%. That implies 40,938 fewer jobs and a total of 356,286.

Women with higher education fare worst, with lack of work affecting 8.7 of every 100, compared with 7.8 for men, the OCEC-UDP said. By age group, educated unemployment is higher among those under 30, it said.

Chile es el país con la tasa de desempleo más alta de la región, según indican diversas publicaciones; y, si se analizan los países de la OCDE, el segundo. En nuestra región de Los Ríos la situación es alarmante, especialmente en jóvenes y mujeres. No se ve ningún proyecto nuevo… pic.twitter.com/dox1io85lC

— Iván Flores García (@ifloressenador) October 11, 2026

Another facet: many higher education graduates who appear employed are actually doing work below their preparation, according to OCEC-UDP. Qualification underemployment occurs when a person performs a task below their preparation and therefore generates added value lower than their potential.

Executive Vice-President Roxana Mînzatu presents Fair Labour Mobility package © European Union

The European Commission has unveiled what it calls an ambitious “Fair Labour Mobility” package aimed at making it easier for people to work across EU borders while strengthening protections against exploitation and fraud.

The proposals would allow workers to prove social security and health insurance entitlements digitally and make qualifications easier to understand and recognize. The Commission estimates the measures could generate €6 billion in benefits by 2040.

Central to the package is a European Social Security Pass, or ESSPASS, enabling people to request and receive documents such as the European Health Insurance Card and the A1 certificate for posted workers online. Documents could be stored in the EU Digital Identity Wallet and verified by national authorities.

Brussels is also proposing faster recognition of professional qualifications. Procedures for regulated professions, including doctors and nurses, with the aim of reducing the target processing time from three months to five weeks.

Recognition of qualifications obtained outside the EU would also be streamlined, with common standards intended to cut average processing times from 14 months to four months.

The European Federation of Nurses Associations (EFN) has welcomed the Commission’s plans for recognising qualifications from outside the EU, arguing that they bring greater transparency to a labour market already heavily reliant on internationally recruited healthcare professionals.

EFN Secretary General Paul De Raeve said recruitment from third countries was already well established and frequently organised through bilateral arrangements between governments. Denmark, he noted, has gone considerably further, establishing a school in Delhi to prepare Indian nurses for work in Denmark, including Danish-language training.

“This is going on,” De Raeve said, arguing that international mobility cannot simply be prevented when European health systems need staff and qualified professionals want to move. In the short term, he said, overseas recruitment is also difficult to avoid given that educating a nurse takes around four years.

For De Raeve, an important improvement in the Commission proposal is therefore not simply facilitating recruitment, but putting it within a clearer European framework. The proposed directive would establish common rules for recognising qualifications obtained outside the EU, including aligned documentation requirements.

It would also provide stronger mechanisms for checking whether qualifications are genuine and meet European standards. Training programmes and institutions seeking access to automatic recognition would undergo EU-level assessment, potentially including independent review, site visits and direct examination of training environments.

De Raeve particularly welcomed this approach, pointing to the risks of fraud in diploma accreditation. Having universities and training institutions formally assessed and certified would give regulators and employers greater confidence that somebody arriving with a qualification has been trained by a legitimate institution to an appropriate standard.

He also welcomed plans to reduce administrative delays for individual professionals.

For nursing, De Raeve argued, faster recognition and stronger verification could help Europe recruit internationally without lowering professional standards, while replacing opaque bilateral arrangements with more consistent EU-level rules.

The proposals still require approval by the European Parliament and EU governments. Key measures would then be phased in over several years, with improvements to the Labour Authority expected during 2028–2030.