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. 

Maybe in some distant future there will be some sort of positive result, when the big droid companies start helping the poor and create some sort of law between droid and human labor. But until that there will be an increasing unemployment rate. Andrew McAfee refers to Voltaire: "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need" which is pretty accurate, the result of unemployment is poverty and that leads to crime. Another negative result is that in some point humans will become expandable and this can lead to a human/droid war which sounds a little excessive but it is a possible result when 1% of the human population have all the power and control of the machines. This may be the most negative result of droids taking human jobs but it's something to consider. 

How will be our John Connor?

Link to TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mcafee_are_droids_taking_our_jobs