“We won’t allow driverless cars in India,” said India’s minister of transport, Nitin Gadkari. “I am very clear on this. We won’t allow any technology that takes away jobs. In a country where you have unemployment, you can’t have a technology that ends up taking people’s jobs.”
In recent years India has seen a boom in the demand for drivers thanks to ride-sharing services like Ola and Uber that completed a combined 500 million rides last year. The country is currently facing an acute truck driver shortage causing an estimated 10% of its truck fleet to sit idle this year due to a lack of qualified drivers.
India’s government is keen to lower its unemployment rate and provide good paying jobs through the hiring of truck drivers and has plans to open one hundred driver training institutes across India in the coming years.
Minister Gadkari’s statements put the India’s government at odds with some of the world’s biggest companies who are rushing to bring self-driving cars to the market.
Ford’s executive chairman, Bill Ford Jr, has said that he feels “quite confident” that the hardware and software will be ready by 2021 for self-driving cars.
Uber’s self-driving truck makes its first delivery on US roads,
Local and national governments around the world are mostly embracing the potential for self-driving cars, with legislation already on the books in a number of US states to permit their use. Both the Obama and Trump administrations have expressed support for self-driving cars.
In Singapore, the government has partnered with nuTonomy and began testing Mitsubishi i-MiEv “robo-taxis” on public roads last year. The project hopes to have 100 robo-taxis in use in Singapore by the end of 2018.
A recent study from Intel estimated the economic impact of the coming global self-driving car industry at $7 trillion by 2050.
mannixg on August 4th, 2017 at 13:03 UTC »
This reminds me of a Milton Friedman story where he's visiting China and is taking a tour of a construction site where they were building a new canal. He notices all of the workers are using shovels instead of high end machinery. When he asks why the person in charge responds, "You don’t understand. This is a jobs program." To which Milton replied: "Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels."
kartoos on August 4th, 2017 at 13:00 UTC »
They should instead invite and even pay Tesla, Google & others to test our their driverless cars on Indian roads in a DARPA style competition.
If a driverless car can successfully navigate on Indian roads which most of the time have no lane markings, potholes, cows, dogs, pedestrians etc. then that car can pretty much drive anywhere in the world. The number of lives saved would surely be more than the number of jobs lost, and at a stretch, even that's at least 30-40 years away for India.
andarv on August 4th, 2017 at 12:00 UTC »
To be fair, any AI that is obligated to drive on the roads of India, would break down and evolve into Skynet in just a few days.. it's self preservation, really.