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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.
GPS - not allowed as fortune tellers will tell you your way. No more airlines will be allowed to use auto-pilot - Pilots are to "point and shoot from now on" ATM's are out as they are going back to bank tellers. Oh the humanity (we'll save)....
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.
...said the minister as he dictated the memorandum to a shorthand stenographer, who then typed it up on a typewriter, and sent it out by a Dehli messenger boy to be posted to the evening Internet by telegram... Oh wait, I guess all those technologies that took away those jobs were ok to happen, just not this one!
India has rampant wealth inequality and absolutely no system in place to redistribute that wealth. Without that automation just hurts people. And I've yet to find a way to move to that idealized Star Trek economy (and no, violence doesn't work, it just devolves into a dictatorship when King Rat takes over. See China, USSR, etc).
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?
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Or maybe even a Constitutional Republic where minority opinions and expression are protected.
"We in India are back woods, and innovation is not a word we understand."
Make use of technology to free up people to do other tasks and increase productivity. If we always sided with maximizing the amount of labor for human beings we would have never accepted the farm tractor.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
That's only allowed when the minority opinions are the right kind of opinions.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
Once again, it's demonstrated that government is the realm of people who are too fucking stupid to get a real job.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You're right. We should consult Berkeley to make sure we've got the right ones.
I doubt we can even come to an agreement on who to consult on the definition of right versus wrong.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This might be for the best... I mean, it's not like automation is gonna work in a 100 years or so considering how the traffic works in cities like Mumbai or Delhi. :P
They'd need to invent a new class 6 level to go through something like that.
Politicians love their vote banks, and will never promote good technologies or any progress that can lead to job loss in the short term. Nobody really tries to think beyond the timeframe that they will be up for re-election, so having a benefit in the medium / long term is simply irrelevant.
Unlike China which aims to be an AI superpower in next couple of decades, India will happily plod along trying to maximize unskilled jobs to make for nice employment statistics. Its very frustrating to see how much inefficiency exists in all areas that could be easily solved by automation or just better processes. Gas station attendants just to pump gas, crappy websites for most services so you end up having to visit physical offices, broken transportation system which guarantees lots of chauffeur employment as no one actually wants to drive if possible, .... and sadly, all parties are populists to some degree or other so there is no chance of things changing for the better due to policy. Most of the economic progress in India happens despite the administration rather than because of it :(
Not the people that are too poor to own a car and would pay less for the ride without a driver.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Uhmm... why the fuck are they allowing any technology at all into the country then?
*EVERY* technology obsoletes some job that used to be done by human beings. Traffic lights put cops out of work. Automated assembly put thousands of employees out of work. The invention of the rifle pretty much spelled the end of bowsmithing. outside of a niche market. The light bulb put street lamp lighters out of work. The list goes on....
The guy is clearly so focussed on what he sees as some sort of immediate problem that his remark doesn't make even the slightest sense.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Hindus believe in reincarnation.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Let's ban electricity as well. And computers. And the internal combustion engine. Imagine how much work we can create if people have to wash their clothes, ride rickshaws, do accounting by hand, etc. That way, we can quickly return to the 17th century, when everybody lived like kings and there was no unemployment or social unrest. It's what progressives crave!
picking and choosing the tech to fit their desired society. Sure, the better solution would be for the fruits of automation to be shared with all, but that's not the world we live and and to be honest a lot of folks don't want it to be. There's the Idle hands/devils plaything camp. There's the folks who don't know what to do if they're not working. There's folks who don't want you taking their money and redistributing it. And there's folks who's only source of power and influence is controlling who gets food & shelter. There's lots of folks who don't _want_ the world automated. Good luck dealing with those people...
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With 130 deaths per 100000 vehicles per year, India is already way ahead from US with its 13 deaths per 100000 vehicles per year. Or, phrased differently, India has already more vehicular deaths per 100000 inhabitants per year (17 compared to US' 11) despite having 25 times fewer cars (only ~32 per 1000 inhabitants compared to US' ~800). They don't need autonomous cars to kill more people with cars; they can already do it just fine.
Ezekiel 23:20
...as he had an appointment to go smash some automated looms.
Back in the good old days, it took thousands of men picking in a field to make cotton, fifty percent of Americans were farmers. The cotton gin sure as hell ruined all that, then came all the rest of the automated farm equipment. Now, less than five percent of the population need to be farmers.
*EVERY* technology obsoletes some job that used to be done by human beings.
Yes. However, for most of history, the "obsolete" people could easily find another job they could do and earn money.
Nobody needs bows anymore? OK, you are good at woodwork, here, make stocks for rifles.
A new textile mill opened and nobody is buying your home-produced cloth? Go work at that factory, now that cloth is cheaper, more people want it and the factory can barely keep up with demand.
Also, I hear that those new factories are burning huge amounts of coal - if there is a coal mine near you, it probably needs some more workers.
The new railroads need huge numbers of people to maintain and drive the trains, lay/maintain the track, control the signals etc.
All this manufacturing needs a lot of raw materials - iron, copper etc - maybe there is a mine near you?
See? In the past there were a lot of jobs for people with little to no formal education, so, if your particular product is now obsolete, you can easily find a similar job (probably making the alternative to your product).
However, today is a bit different. So the coal mine is closing down because there is not enough demand. OK, maybe you can find a job at a factory? The are all either automated or in China. Well, maybe a taxi driver? Self-driving cars.
Not every taxi driver or coal miner can be a programmer.
The difference today is that instead of requiring the "obsolete" people to do a bit different jobs (like it was in the past - less jobs in one place meant increased demand of people somewhere else), we offer no alternatives to them. Self driving cars do not need drivers, but they also do not need anything more than regular cars. In comparison, a old-time factory reduces the number of people required to produce a certain amount of product, but increases the need of coal for its steam engines, requiring more coal miners to keep up with demand.
It's a safe bet that if we waited until there was a job market for people who would get laid off on account of technology putting somebody out of work, I dare say we would be living in a very different world than we do. When cars went from being built by hand to being built by machine it put a staggering number of people out of work that had no idea what they were going to do next..... the thing is, once they were in that position, many figured out a way to move on.... a way that they would not have anticipated if they had not been put in the situation where they had to adapt or die.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Yep. He doesn't need to worry. The way they drive drive means a lot more advances in AI are needed before any Indian jobs will be in danger.
No sig today...
Agreed, although I dare say some of them just end up homeless.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
What about self driving toilets?
I'm sure that once Uber switch to self-driving cars, the person who books a car that was last used for a pub run will get a complimentary turd.
Jobs was a Buddhist, but there was a story here on /. on how his afterlife is thought to be
Fascinating. He probably wasn't (lots of people play at it), but do you think the Indian transport Minister is?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."