Online Reflection 2
"Are droids taking our jobs?"
This blog
entry is a reflection on a TED talk from Andrew McAfee, he raises the question
about today's unemployment and how technology is affecting people's
ability to earn a living. The primary
question is "Are droids taking our jobs"?
To
summarize the TED talk Andrews answer is
yes, the droids are taking our jobs. But he can see a bright future because
technology is evolving in a way that people can start focusing on more
important things than just labor, like reduce poverty and drudgery around the
world. He gives an example in the TED talk about the steam engine and how revolutionary
it was to overcome the limitation of our muscles, now we are entering a era
that we are overcoming the limitations of our individual brains. Andrew McAfee
says that this is just the beginning.
Well I
agree that technology is giving the humans more time to pursue other things and
maybe this freed time is going to help the worlds poverty, but for me this is a
very positive ideal. The jobs that are being replace by robots are low and
middle class jobs, the only ones benefiting
from this are the companies that don't need to pay salary to humans.
How will be our John
Connor?
Link to TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mcafee_are_droids_taking_our_jobs
MacAfee sees a bright future when computers take over more and more of human tasks. You see a darker future. I might actually agree with you. But not in the sense that there will be a machine-human war. I see a dark future in the human nature. The lazier we get, we take more and more for granted and the less we put any effort in anything important. I have seen it already. The kids don't care about school. People prefer collecting unemployment than taking uninteresting low class jobs. There is a decline in research and development because it actually takes some effort. I am really worried that I will not collect any pension because there will not be enough people working to pay my pension. I think the human nature is very susceptible to media and with more spare time people will find more and more gibberish that they can believe in. This can be very dangerous. We can se it in Sweden with SD, we can see it in France with IS, and we can se it in so many other places. Things like these did not occur when people were busy working, taking care of their families or attending school as they should.
SvaraRaderaI do think you see a very dark future. Yes there will be change, but the world always changes slowly. You're saying that it's the lower and middle class jobs beeing replaced, which is true, but the same can be said by the computer, and do you really think the world would be better wtihout it? The computers themselves created job oportunities, most of them for lower and middle class. So as the generation changes so shifts the job market. There's less people sorting old punch cards and more working in IT. I do think the same thing will happen if robots took "our" jobs. They would do the mundane tasks, but there will be need for service or control of robots, something close to a car mechanic, which is considered a "low class" job.
SvaraRaderaI see more of an Utopia than i see a Skynet, it's all about perspective.
/Erik