India: No Driverless Cars to Protect Jobs

[AceSkywalker]

Won’t allow driverless cars that take away jobs: Nitin Gadkari

The Indian Minister of Transportation, Nitin Gadkari, has stated that he will not allow driverless cars to operate in India to protect driving jobs in the country. He estimates a need for more than 2.2 million commercial drivers currently and is opening 100 drivers ed centers to alleviate this problem.

Any thoughts on this protectionist stance? Could this be a signal towards more pushback against driverless technology?

 

[croman]

Won’t allow driverless cars that take away jobs: Nitin Gadkari

The Indian Minister of Transportation, Nitin Gadkari, has stated that he will not allow driverless cars to operate in India to protect driving jobs in the country. He estimates a need for more than 2.2 million commercial drivers currently and is opening 100 drivers ed centers to alleviate this problem.

Any thoughts on this protectionist stance? Could this be a signal towards more pushback against driverless technology?

No that's just India being dysfunctional. Safety takes a back seat to cronyism. Its a shame. There will be public pressure but pols are corrupt. That being said, there are many bigger issues India has to deal with but anyone that has visited India even briefly understands that autonomous driving would be both a challenge and also doable given the relatively low speeds in urban areas but infrastructure is an ongoing issue.

 

[JeffK]

Protecting jobs vs protecting lives... hmm

 

[oktane]

Pure stupidity on India's part. Why not ban cars also to protect the horse & carriage or rickshaw driver? Guess what, technology makes certain jobs obsolete. Deal with it by providing education, not stifling innovation.

 

[AceSkywalker]

Pure stupidity on India's part. Why not ban cars also to protect the horse & carriage or rickshaw driver? Guess what, technology makes certain jobs obsolete. Deal with it by providing education, not stifling innovation.

The masses don't like that. They want their jobs in the industries they work in protected. Saying what you said will end a politician's career in a heartbeat. Voters want politicians that fight tooth and nail for jobs. I'm concerned that companies will only see dollar signs when they replace humans with machines/AI versus a terminated employee who's gonna have a harder time to keep the lights on in their house.

 

[croman]

Trump won an election lying to everyone that jobs wouldn't leave or were coming back (coal industry, carrier plant in IN (which just laid off those workers trump claimed to have saved), etc.).

This isn't unique to India. The thing with India is that the pols actually need to listen to their constituents because its a real democracy despite the corruption unlike the US. Voting actually translates to representation which translates to power to control policies.

 

[SabrToothSqrl]

Elevator Operator used to be a job. So did Phone Operator...

Adapt or get out of the way.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

It's demagoguery.
It's going to be much harder for autonomy to displace driving jobs in a country where taxi drivers earn $1k to $10k per year. It's also going to be much harder given that Indians drive small, cheap cars.

Autonomy is something that should be of great benefit to countries with a higher cost of living, but in developing countries with low cost of living and high youth unemployment the country is not going to push hard for it. They will be able to get a lot of the benefits at much lower cost with driver assistance systems.

 

[EchoDelta]

If I were India I would be investing in high-reliability "drive centers" where folks could drive you by wire.... so manufacturers with some homologated camera hardware can delegate their driving remotely. These days there is less and less need to have the chauffeur in the car (or just one chauffeur per car - via a rough consensus algorithm ).

It's a bleak image (a dark room with 200 VR-headset wearing folks) but feasible as a bridge over what may be a short but rough journey through L3 and L4 autonomy levels.

 

[Shock-On-T]

This is understandable.

India is already one of the least suitable countries for autonomous vehicles, due to the incredibly varied and complex traffic system.
India's roads are used by more species than just homo sapiens, and usually have no road markings. When there are road markings they are largely ignored.

The human users have a mesmerizing array of vehicles at their disposal: rickshaws, bicycles, tuktuks, motorcycles, ox-carts, elephants, camels, donkeys, cars, trucks, custom-built load carriers of all shapes.

You'd need more than AP, you'd need AI to navigate India's roads.

Add to that the very low cost of a human driver in India, and the incentive go autonomous approaches zero.

It will happen one day, but that day is far away.

 

[cwerdna]

^^^
Indeed. I've never been there but some of my coworkers have been there on business and have kind of described it.

A few searches on YouTube should give others a flavor.

Here's a crazy example:

Have skipped around pieces of

.

Driving in the US seems sane, in comparison.

 

[deonb]

I actually loved driving around in India - it's very organic and makes full use of the road. And I can't see a computer doing that anytime soon.

But India isn't a unique outlier here.

Below is around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris (somewhere else that I love driving - to the consternation of my wife). Presumably this is somewhere that Tesla DOES want to drive autonomously sometimes soon:

 

[croman]

I actually loved driving around in India - it's very organic and makes full use of the road. And I can't see a computer doing that anytime soon.

Definitely agree on both counts. Everything about India is organic and unlikely that it could be mapped or predicted. Its a wonder there are so few accidents. Walking across the street is a science. Driving is not for the faint of heart.

The final thing is that Indian drivers communicate more with horns and high beam flashing ("dipping") than most other places in the world. That is another layer I don't see anyone figuring out with autonomous systems.