News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on India will ban driverless cars in order to protect jobs. Parent comment

Re:India will ban driverless cars in order to protect jobs by taneq on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:06PM (#14844207)
Because it's busywork, and it's wasting all those peoples' time. It's strictly inferior to letting a few workers use machinery to do the job, while paying the rest of the workers to sit around idle, because when using machinery you can rapidly increase output if required and the idle workers have the option to find something more useful to do.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:India will ban driverless cars in order to protect jobs by KekDemaga on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:22PM (#14844303)
Where do I sign up to be one of the idle workers?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:India will ban driverless cars in order to protect jobs by taneq on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:39PM (#14844390)
Give it 10-20 years and you won't need to sign up, you'll just receive your UBI into your bank account every week. Well, that or the country you live in will have to let 30-40% of its people starve because there's nothing they can do better than a machine.

Remember, those idle workers aren't being paid a nice pay packet. They'll be on subsistence wages only. You'll still want to work a job if you want nice things.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:India will ban driverless cars in order to protect jobs by KekDemaga on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:46PM (#14844431)
If I'm one of those skilled workers who can do something better than a machine it seems the rational course of action is to move to one of the places where they let people starve and keep more of the fruits of my labor.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:India will ban driverless cars in order to protect jobs by cjalmeida on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @01:31AM (#14845319)
Until those people decide they should forcefully separate your head from your neck. See France (1787), Haiti (1791), USA (1861), Turkey(1908), Russia (1917), China (1949)...

Those are only the most notable major civil wars, but it's amazing how revolts are common across the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolutions_and_rebell...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:India will ban driverless cars in order to protect jobs by tspike on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @01:33AM (#14845329)
Strictly inferior by one metric. There are other factors to optimize for, e.g. rate of environmental destruction, median life satisfaction, social cohesiveness, breadth of knowledge vs specialization.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:India will ban driverless cars in order to protect jobs by taneq on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @04:02AM (#14845998)
So you're on the teaspoon side of the debate? (Or at least, you're saying that it's nuanced and that some nuances do favour the teaspoon side.)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:India will ban driverless cars in order to protect jobs by tspike on Saturday July 29, 2017 @01:18AM (#14879628)
Yes, the latter- you can take either side ad absurdum, though the teaspoon side is easier to mischaracterize. Single-variable optimization is easy; multivariate is much harder especially when wetware is involved.
[ Parent | on HN ]