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What Hacker News says
- It's possible without being patronising or racist to say that India needs to follow a different model of development than the western one. In fact, that idea was central to the Gandhian independence struggle - just read the great man's Hind Swaraj!
There are many reasons for doing so. For one, we don't have colonies we can screw over - i.e., India's India - while enriching ourselves. Assuming we would want to do that at all.
We also don't have the window of opportunity that China had for becoming a manufacturing hub. That's been done and while we can compete for a percentage of the spoils, it will never be the gold rush that took manufacturing to China. The politics of globalization alone will ensure that.
Second, we don't have the luxury of several decades of uninterrupted "development" before thinking about the environment. Climate change is going to hit us hard well before that, and one look at the water crisis should tell you that the basic necessities of life will need to be carefully managed.
I have nothing against assembling iPhones in Bangalore. Or becoming the world capital of CRISPR technologies. However, those can't become the driving forces of a future India. We need to think boldly beyond those constraints. I am not saying returning to a romantic conception of an ideal past, but a detour around the mess that industrial capitalism is already creating and will continue to create if we don't think of alternatives.
- This piece reminded me, of all things, of Gandhi's essay "Hind Swaraj." He was pretty anti-technological-driven change.
He was anti: - Machinery replacing handicraft (skill disappeared and poverty followed) - Labor-saving machines replacing human workers (workers became expendable) - Doctors replacing consequences (people lost self-control) - Railways replacing constraint and slowness (harm spread faster)
But he loved the sewing machine.
Gandhi’s test for whether to accept tech-driven change was whether it satisfied primary needs. Interpretation of those needs was certainly not universal. As he wrote: "...it is not the primary need of man to traverse distances with the rapidity of a motor car. The needle on the contrary happens to be an essential thing in life, a primary need.”
That's the airplane in this post. Excitement or fear of the AI airplane is either judged as helping mathematicians (sewing machine) or doing something not quite right (the above machinery/doctor/railway)...
- Some of the things he’s advocating seem nonsensical to me.
For example he says it would be a good thing if all railways and hospitals ended up being destroyed.
If all hospitals ended up destroyed what would happen to the people who need treatment for bacterial infections? Or need treatment for heart attacks? Or need dialysis? Or get necrotizing fasciitis and need surgery? Or need cancer treatment?
And if all the railways and factories and such are destroyed how do you manufacture medicine and antibiotics and other devices to save lives?
I understand the things I mentioned just now weren’t around in 1908 when Gandhi wrote that essay but who knows what advancements modern AI could bring that we can’t imagine now?
https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/hind_swaraj.pdf
This is a PDF of that Gandhi book. Under the “A Word of Explanation” you find Gandhi saying he would welcome the natural destruction of hospitals and railways.
- I disagree his arguments are timeless.
https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/hind_swaraj.pdf
I posted more in another comment on this thread but here’s a PDF of his book. Gandhi says in the “A Word of Explanation” section that he would welcome the natural destruction of hospitals. How is that timeless?
- Good effort. I doubt if real life Gandhi would be like this character though. In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi talks about banning railways and vaccines..
- Gandhi was one of the huge number of people influenced and inspired by G.K. Chesterton. Gandhi read an essay of Chesterton's on Indian nationalism in 1909, which in part went:
"The principal weakness of Indian Nationalism seems to be that it is not very Indian and not very national. It is all about Herbert Spencer and Heaven knows what. What is the good of the Indian national spirit if it cannot protect its people from Herbert Spencer? I am not fond of the philosophy of Buddhism; but it is not so shallow as Spencer's philosophy; it has real ideas of its own. One of the papers, I understand, is called the Indian Sociologist. What are the young men of India doing that they allow such an animal as a sociologist to pollute their ancient villages and poison their kindly homes?
When all is said, there is a national distinction between a people asking for its own ancient life and a people asking for things that have been wholly invented by somebody else. There is a difference between a conquered people demanding its own institutions and the same people demanding the institutions of the conqueror. Suppose an Indian said: "I heartily wish India had always been free from white men and all their works. Every system has its sins: and we prefer our own. There would have been dynastic wars; but I prefer dying in battle to dying in hospital. There would have been despotism; but I prefer one king whom I hardly ever see to a hundred kings regulating my diet and my children. There would have been pestilence; but I would sooner die of the plague than die of toil and vexation in order to avoid the plague. There would have been religious differences dangerous to public peace; but I think religion more important than peace. Life is very short; a man must live somehow and die somewhere; the amount of bodily comfort a peasant gets under your best Republic is not so much more than mine. If you do not like our sort of spiritual comfort, we never asked you to. Go, and leave us with it." Suppose an Indian said that, I should call him an Indian Nationalist, or, at least, an authentic Indian, and I think it would be very hard to answer him. But the Indian Nationalists whose works I have read simply say with ever-increasing excitability, "Give me a ballot-box. Provide me with a Ministerial dispatch-box. Hand me over the Lord Chancellor's wig. I have a natural right to be Prime Minister. I have a heaven-born claim to introduce a Budget. My soul is starved if I am excluded from the Editorship of the Daily Mail," or words to that effect."[0]
On reading this, Gandhi "immediately translated it into Gujarati, and on the basis of it he wrote his book Hind Swaraj, his own first formulation of a specifically "Indian" solution to his country’s problems. Thus you might argue, not quite absurdly, that India owed its independence, or at least the manner in which it came, to an article thrown off by Chesterton in half-an-hour in a Fleet Street pub."[0]
"Gandhi read G. K. Chesterton's essay in the Illustrated London News on September 18, advising young Indians to hold by their traditional culture rather than introducing the new ideas associated with Herbert Spencer. Gandhi was so delighted with this that he told Indian Opinion to reprint it. Gandhi also liked a letter by Chesterton to the Daily News of October 22; Chesterton preached a version of Ruskin's and Morris's enthusiasm for the culture of the Middle Ages."[1]
[0] http://americanchestertonsociety.blogspot.com/2009/01/gandhi...
[1] Martin Green, Gandhi: Voice of a New Age Revolution, 2009
