Every once in a while you have one of those “microcosm experiences” that perfectly encapsulates the trends shaping our world. My most recent one came last week during an Uber ride.

I needed to get from my house in Cambridge to the WBUR studios in Boston so I could be a guest on local legend Christopher Lydon’s new show Radio Open Source. Ray Kurzweil, the other guest, was calling in from California. Instead of walking (too far), driving (no parking), or taking a cab (unreliable, inconvenient, and unpleasant), I did what a lot of people are doing these days: used my iPhone’s Uber app to summon a ride. Since I was paying for this one myself and I’m cheap, I chose uberX, where drivers use their private cars instead of limos. A couple minutes later a clean, new car pulled up; I hopped in, and off we went.

Because I’m interested in the peer economy I followed standard practice and asked the driver how long he’d been part of the Uber network and how he liked it. And I heard a very interesting story.

My driver said he’d been with Uber ever since he’d graduated from his master’s program in IT project management last year. This profession was, according to him, going through hard times. In the wake of the great recession steady jobs had been replaced by short-term contracts, and there weren’t even a lot of these to be had. As a result he was now competing against much more experienced people for each new gig that came up, and he hadn’t had a lot of success since graduating.

So to cover his monthly fixed costs of student loan payments (on more than $100k in debt), rent, and health care he was driving for Uber. A lot. He estimated that he spent more than 60 hours a week behind the wheel. This allowed him to pay his bills, but not to build up any real savings.

To which I say good for him, and for Uber. This is a guy who could be sitting around waiting for the dream job he’d gone to school for, collecting unemployment, defaulting on his loans, and/or dropping out of the labor force for good. Instead, he was working hard at a job that was available.

The days when high-paying factory jobs were available to anyone willing to work hard are long gone. My driver’s job existed because a small group of venture-backed entrepreneurs created a technology platform that matched up cars and drivers with people who were willing to pay for a ride. Most cars are chronically underutilized and in a time of high unemployment, so are too many people. Uber’s founders came up with a clever way to put them to work, and to do so while maintaining an enviable service and safety record.

Many other jobs today offer an unpalatable combination of low pay and low autonomy, with overbearing bosses and horrendous schedules set by someone else. Uber offers a great deal of autonomy, which is one of the reasons it appealed to my driver.

I call my ride a microcosm experience because it resonated with at least three other recent events. The first is Cambridge’s recent attempt to block Uber, which I wrote about here. Favoring the city’s truly lousy taxi incumbents over employment opportunities and service improvements brought by Uber is simply folly.

The second is the conversation I had with Kurzweil on the air once I got to the studio (the podcast is here). As far as I can tell he thinks that there are no real challenges accompanying today’s rapid tech progress. He predicted that there will be plenty of jobs, and that they’ll be fulfilling ones that allow people to pursue their passions. Well, my driver couldn’t find work doing what he went to school for, and he didn’t describe driving people around as his passion. My read of the evidence is that good, secure, fulfilling jobs are declining as we head deeper into the second machine age, not spreading throughout the economy.

Third is a recent “tweetstorm“ from Marc Andreessen. He highlights previous predictions of technological unemployment, which turned out to be wrong. His point is that they failed to properly account for innovation and entrepreneurship like Uber, which finds new and unforeseen uses for human labor (his arguments are in some ways similar to Kurzweil’s, but with less emphasis on personal growth and fulfillment and more on economic opportunity).

Andreessen stresses that if we want solutions to our economic woes, we have to let innovation and entrepreneurship flourish. I couldn’t agree more; they’re absolutely necessary to fix what ails us.

I wish I shared Andreessen’s confidence that they’ll be sufficient, as well as necessary — that future rounds of innovation and entrepreneurship, abetted by pro-market policies, will take care of today’s un- and under-employment.

I certainly hope he’s right, but most of the long-term trends I see are pointing in the other direction (for a summary of the data I’m talking about, see this slideshare). I don’t think that’s just because business-hostile policies and a regulatory thicket are choking off job and wage growth. I think that it’s more fundamentally because technology is leaving a lot of workers behind as it races ahead.

Entrepreneurship and business innovation — like Uber — should be our first response to this phenomenon. But we might also need other ones. Education reform, tax policy changes, and a revised and improved social safety net might also well be needed. They’d benefit my Uber driver, and lots of others like him.