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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.
I don't think India is at risk of having any self-driving cars any time soon. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read more than one account of India's roads, and last I heard they were still a chaotic nightmare most places, where the rules of the road are barely even suggestions, let alone guidelines. That's not an environment a robot can be expected to function well in, if at all. Unless Indians somehow Westernized their vehicular behavior in the past year, there's no risk at all of self-driving vehicles showing up there. 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.
India's Transport Minister is grandstanding in the best tradition of government ministers everywhere, "solving" a nonexistent problem.
As an Indian, I'm horrified at this. While I appreciate that India is very far from deploying any driverless cars, to enforce a policy forbidding the tech is really short sighted. If we listen to Gadkari and his like, all administrative work should be done with pen and paper, all accounting should be entered manually into a ledger, all farming should be done by pulling a plow manually. It is rather unfortunate that someone like him is in power.
India has rampant wealth inequality and absolutely no system in place to redistribute that wealth.
Rampant wealth inequality is a fact of life. People are not all equally capable of generating wealth or intelligent with their dispensation of acquired wealth so no matter what system you try to use, some will end up having more or less. Even the various communist governments of the world had or have wealth inequality to similar extents as the various capitalist western democracies. Wealth redistribution systems that arbitrarily take from those who are successful to give to those who are not tend to fall apart over time. Some transition peacefully towards more capitalist systems like Vietnam and China and others collapse into failed states like Somalia that are plagued by civil war.
Can somebody can tell me how to pry the 1% away from their wealth, 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?
Provide them a good or a service that they want to purchase? That's typically how I get people wealthier than I am to part with some of their money.
To your other point though, If the wealthy already have everything you want, what is the point of having wealth at that point? If having an automated worker is sufficient to provide you with everything you need, what's to stop someone who has automated works from building more automated workers and giving them to the people who don't already have them? I suppose you could say power and control, but what's the point of having either if they can't get you anything for having them?
All that aside, inheritance taxes with a reasonable exemption threshold to allow for small family businesses are a possibility if you grant that in return income taxes would be reduced. I generally think it's a better setup in that it allows people who generate wealth to keep it, but doesn't allow for vast family fortunes where people of no particular skill are wealthy simply by virtue of being born into that wealth. It might sound good on paper, but in practice I expect it would just result in more people setting up their own foundations, charitable enterprises, etc. as most people who manage to accumulate vast sums of wealth in their own life probably wouldn't trust the government to manage it.
There's always some kind of Brave New World setup where humans are manufactured, at which point why make incapable people. That story didn't have robotic laborers, but assuming there were, you'd really only care to have Alphas and perhaps Betas.