I absolutely
hate those super trendy commercials showing young people completely enamored
with their “apps,” “social media,” and “mobile devices.” Sure, this “technology” feeds their
insatiable appetites for a non-stop stream of mindless “content.” But what the kids don’t realize is that this
same technology, while well-suited to their short attention spans, is also taking
away their jobs—or preventing them from landing jobs in the first place. In Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, Martin Ford explains how robots—or, more accurately, smart
algorithms that know how to teach themselves—are now doing jobs that college
grads used to do. This, in turn, forces a
very large percentage of college grads into jobs that do not, in any imaginable
way, require a college degree. Then, the
workers that would typically have held those unskilled jobs are forced into
long-term or even permanent unemployment or underemployment.
And
few jobs are safe. It’s not just factory
jobs (long gone) or agriculture jobs (long, long gone) that are affected; robots
are now even capable of making burgers, driving cars, reviewing legal documents, writing sports and news articles, and—much to my disdain—answering and routing phone calls for giant corporations.
Alarmingly,
more education—the solution to the job displacement created by past technological advances—won’t work this time. Lawyers,
engineers, journalists, computer scientists, and even some types of medical doctors have
been or are being displaced by the machines.
And worst of all, the financial benefits that result from displacing humans
are being concentrated in the hands a very few—something that didn’t happen
with productivity gains of the past.
If
all of this sounds familiar, it should.
As Ford acknowledges, people have feared technology for centuries. However, Ford writes, there are many reasons
to believe that this time things could be different for us—and not in
a good way.
If
Ford is correct, then it would turn out that the Luddites were right—their
idea was just 200 years ahead of its time.
I don't think that we should be afraid of this development and neither do I think that everyone on earth will end up jobless. Technological development is inevitable and something that we should not be afraid of. The human mind is indispensable and there will always be humans needed, just in another way than we're used to. We should adjust our educational system accordingly to this.
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