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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.
...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!
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
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.
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.
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.