There is a distinct but now amusing memory I have from a little over seven years ago of looking through all the apps in the iPhone app store, which was then brand spanking new. It seems unfathomable now, but in late 2008 apps were very far from the mainstream, and lacking the imagination and ubiquity of today. The success and pervasiveness of mobile computing, symbiotically, helped popularise them. And arguably the most successful app of all is Uber — now the most valuable private company in the world worth currently (and imminent verge-of-tech-crash status notwithstanding) $62.5bn.

Uber started with an itch that needed to be scratched — that taxi cabs in San Francisco were unreliable and expensive. It built a following because suddenly there was another option that was cheaper, more frequent and easier to book. Uber has its own problems, from a customer point of view; I’ve had Uber rides where the driver got lost and I had to navigate him through the city, and also a ride that cancelled on me after making me wait 45 minutes in the arse end of nowhere.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Black cabs bring London to a halt in Uber protest – video

And there couldn’t have been a billion rides without the requisite representation of human malevolence too, hence the claims of sexual and physical assault, harassment, driving while drunk, kidnapping and the odd death.The scale and speed of Uber’s growth over a very few years is astonishing even by the standard of exponential tech industry, and the scale of operational challenges are just as great.

Consider an average day for Uber’s communications team. On any given day there is likely to be a protest. Most recently those have been drivers angry that Uber is increasing its commission and effectively cutting drivers’ pay, prompting protests across the US.

Then there are battles with local cab drivers and regulators; 100 cab drivers blocked the streets of Budapest in January to complain that Uber is taking work from them, and similar protests have been happening worldwide since 2014. This week, Uber itself protested about regulations in Paris that restricted its drivers, suspending its own app during the protest to prove, well, some kind of point.

The regulatory and policy related challenges could hardly be more complicated. Uber operates in more than 150 cities in 64 countries, battling established regulations around licenced taxi drivers in nearly all of those, and establishing its own army of (at last count, June 2015) at least 250 lobbyists across the US alone.

And a series of court battles in the US have tried to test whether drivers are its staff – entitled to benefits such as holiday, healthcare and help maintaining their cars – or freelance contractors, entitled to very little. In one of the latest protests, at San Francisco airport, one driver complained about Uber Pool, the service that lets users pay less by sharing rides with other users: “I took one person to the Panhandle, one to Embarcadero and one to their hotel – I got paid $61 and it took me 45 minutes. I have to pay for the car and the gas, and it’s not doing my haemorrhoids any good.”

But you have to be careful what you wish for. You don’t have to look too far into Uber’s future to see that its most persistent and at least superficially damaging policy issues now – all those involving human drivers – will soon evaporate. At a tech conference last autumn, CEO Travis Kalanick told the crowd his vision for Uber.

Uber hails victory after Transport for London drops restrictions Read more

Recently, he said, he was standing on top of a building in San Francisco and looked down at all the cars. These should all be Uber! Then we would free up so much time. That’s my gift to you, because when San Francisco only has Uber cars there won’t be traffic jams, and you’ll all have an hour more every day to spend with your families. Wow, thanks Travis.

But of course they do want every car to be an Uber car, and they also want it to be an autonomous, computer-controlled car. For all its talk of partners and empowering workers who want flexibility to work when they want by being an Uber driver … they will drop them all without hesitation when self-driving cars are ready to take over.

What will some of the lowest paid workers in the Bay Area do then? Retrain to wipe up sick from autonomous pods on Saturday morning, and polish the headlights?

Human drivers are just mapping out the system, the network, the capacity and the interest. One day, even self-driving cars will start unionising and protesting against their treatment by The Man but until then, they will look like a much better option than pesky human beings.