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Autonomous Vehicles | Will They Will They Not in India

Background
Almost every other day there is a news article explaining how Artificial Intelligence (mostly wedded to Deep Neural Networks) will take over the mundane task of driving your car. The positive articles suggest that this vehicle automation will make us all do -better- things like read newspaper while being (auto) chauffeur driven and the negative articles say that these will take away the jobs of taxi drivers (invariably taxi is equivalent to Uber!).

Depending on  whom you speak to you get an answer suggesting anything from 6 months to next couple of year. But almost all seem to be very positive about the possibility of robo-cars on the roads. It is not that they have not been tried, they have in a very very controlled scenario (equivalent to prototype) and when it has been left semi-loose we have had reports of them getting a little scenarios which we humans do. So there is still work to do.

 Will it become a reality?
May be in some places, but very unlikely in a city like Mumbai, Delhi (India) where the traffic is not as bad as the picture below is quite chaotic and to expect the unexpected is the first thing a driver learns!

The concept of fine driving (from fine dining!) is absent, the concept of lane depends on the time of the day. The marking on the lanes are courtesy rains and the contractor who gets paid to do the work. The signals may not be visible, the pedestrians could suddenly cross the main road! Every "assumption" under which the self-drive works is not true. So even if self-drive cars make a debut in the west; it will most likely not see much of Indian roads!

 If they made it on road in India
For the sake of argument, even if they made it and if we assume (second assumption!) that it will effect Uber drivers in India. We will certainly have the drivers make a protest. May be they do not need to anything special, they just need to get onto the road in hoards and just pretend to move on the road just in front of the auto-driving car multiple times to fool the AI driver to feel that it is not safe to move. The car would stay put! Drivers back into the Uber seat. 

 May be drivers elsewhere need to worry. Not the drivers in India. Not anytime soon. Never.
 
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