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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.
...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.
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.
That's outdated thinking. India has come a LONG way in the past 20 years. For example some cars will actually stop at red lights, ... on major intersections, ... during certain times of the day.