You pick up a bright red apple and put it in your basket. Then an orange, and finally a sandwich. Instead of getting in line to check out though, you walk right out the door and drive away. Shoplifting! No, this may be what shopping looks like in the coming years. Situations like this are what Richard Gray, a science journalist that studied biochemistry at the University of Edinburgh, are afraid of. Richard Gray & George Dvorsky argue that automation can lead to products being made faster & more cheaply but they will decrease the amount of jobs available.
 |
| pinterest.com |
Whether you realize it or not, automation is already all around us. From the annoying AI customer service on the phone, to McDonald's order kiosks. Gray claims that “around 1.7 million robots are already in use around the world, but they are largely used in industrial settings where few humans are allowed to set foot.” He says that another “company is pursuing robotic technology that could assist human warehouse workers [and] still handle produce safely, making the process faster and cheaper for [companies].” The main purpose of most of these automations is to reduce the cost of labor leading to more savings for companies. Companies have a scarcity of money and want to spend that money on the thing that will give them the most return for the price. Therefore, they choose to automate things. This will particularly be seen in the coming years.
It is almost guaranteed that an increase in automation will lead to job loss, but how much is still up for debate. Gray says that a “Reports suggest that 47% of people employed in the US are at risk of being replaced by machines.” This is reason enough to be afraid of automation, but it doesn’t help with the overall problem and debate. Is the loss of these jobs worth the lives that this technology will likely save.
Another writer, George Dvorsky, who is a bioethics, adds that “Each additional robot in the US economy reduces employment by 5.6 workers, and every robot that is added to the workforce per 1,000 human workers causes wages to drop by as much as 0.25 to 0.5 percent. Such are the conclusions reached by MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Boston University’s Pascual Restrepo, who published their findings at the National Bureau of Economic Research.” This is even more alarming because not only are robots reducing the amount of jobs, there also reducing the amount that workers get paid. This is because workers will no longer need to do some of the tasks that they are currently employed to do. Robots will likely do the more simple and repetitive tasks reducing the amount of work that humans need to do. Future Research Questions:
- Should advances in automation be regulated, how much should they be regulated, and who should regulate it?
- Will increased automation actually save more lives in the long run?
- Should a basic income be considered?
