Slashdot Mirror
India's Transport Minister Vows To Ban Self-Driving Cars To Save Jobs (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Companies in the United States, Germany, Japan, and other countries are racing to develop self-driving cars. But India's top transportation regulator says that those cars won't be welcome on Indian streets any time soon. "We won't allow driverless cars in India," said Nitin Gadkari, India's minister for Road Transport, Highways, and Shipping, according to the Hindustan Times. "I am very clear on this. We won't allow any technology that takes away jobs." Gadkari is taking a very different approach from politicians in the United States, where both the Obama and Trump administrations have been keen to promote the development of self-driving vehicles. "We are bullish on automated vehicles," said Obama Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx last year. His successor, Elaine Chao, has also signaled support for self-driving technology, while also expressing concerns about safety risks and potential job losses.
Quite aside from the price of the extra equipment. India is still the place that wants and needs to build sub-$6000 vehicles. There's not a lot of room in that budget for servos and sensors.
And the labor costs are very low, so the savings are small. They're basically last in line and talking as if it was coming any day now.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That may be a solution.
The trouble is that there are no labor intensive industries to take up the displaced workers.
When I see a new factory opening and the business and local politicians praising it for hiring hundreds of workers, I just think - 'so?'
We are going to need hundreds of thousands of operations like that - and they're not coming.
We don't have industries like the nascent auto industry in the late 19th and early 20th century that needed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of workers. Or the early aviation industry.
And the economists' solution of "moving up the food chain" is impractical to say the least. Even if everyone were able to do any profession they were trained to do, there's a point of saturation. We will only need so many engineers and programmers in the automation field. The demand isn't infinite.
And we can't rely on magical thinking of something sometime will come along or 'we've dealt with this in the past." - no, we haven't. Humanity has never had to deal with this issue- The industrial revolution was nothing like this.
tl;dr: There will be a point where there just isn't enough work for everyone.
Can somebody can tell me how to pry the 1% away from their wealth[y]
I assume you mean without a violent revolution?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Can somebody can tell me how to pry the 1% away from their wealth
Statistics fail! There will always be, by definition, a wealthy 1%.
Also, they earned their money, what gives anyone the right to take it from them? If you want their money then the best way to get it is the same way they got it, by trading up. I traded $30 for a tank of gas this morning, who got "wealthy" from that? The answer is both me and the gas station. They wanted my $30 more than they wanted that gasoline, and I wanted the gasoline more than I wanted the $30. Now with that $30 they can go buy more gasoline, and pay the cashier, and pay the lease on the property, and so on. With my tank of gas I can now get to and from classes for a week, which gives me an education that has a value of it's own.
especially in a post automation economy when they don't even need workers to buy their goods anymore because who need to sell things when you already own everything?
This sounds like someone that lacks knowledge of history. People have always found work, doing things we never even thought of before. Long ago a "computer" was a person good at math. Now such people work at programming the machines we call computers.
Who knows what they will be doing. I'm quite certain though that they will still be able to find work, because supply often creates a demand on its own. No one knew they wanted a dishwasher until someone started selling them. What are all those people supposed to do now that they aren't washing dishes? I don't know, but they won't be wasting their time doing something so monotonous.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.