Artificial intelligence and its implementations have enabled the human race to achieve tasks better and more efficiently than ever before; the rate at which it is growing, however, will replace humans, rendering them unemployed. Over the years, men have worked so hard in innovations, however, so ironically as to try and create their perfect replacement. Artificial intelligence is basically the development of machines with the capability of doing complex tasks that would ordinarily need a human being to perform. This intelligence extends to tasks that include visual perception, recognition of speech, language or dialect translation, and, ultimately, decision-making. The machines have now been used in everyday workstations. Where one would need a guard to secure entry, fingerprints are used to open entry. Machines now do welding in factories, machines now do accounting for companies and machines are even performing very complicated surgeries. There is, therefore, a reason to be worried about the fate of humans since artificial intelligence seems to be really replacing humans.
In an article in the new York time (Williams, 2018) the author writes about his fear that the robots the kids are so fascinated with right now may come to take their jobs in future. He uses a brilliant example of a child who just completed college and attended college at Yale University to study radiology in the hopes of getting a basic salary of $470,000 dollars a year but only to finish and find that A.I robots have taken over the job and are better at reading the scans than he is. Right now, for instance, there is a robot that can do the magnetic resonance imaging of the blood flow through the heart in a record time of 15 seconds, a task that would have taken a human expert counterpart 45 minutes to do. He also raises the concern that many are too optimistic to accept that robots are getting way too smart and they are going to destroy the human race. The same concern has been raised by several others in the industry, such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and the late Stephen Hawking.
Martin Ford, in his new book, Rise of the Robots, has stated his concern that robots are going to overhaul the economy. He takes note of the robots developed by a company, Momentum Machines, that can flip a McDonald’s burger in 10 seconds. This, to him, was not a good innovation but a troubling one. With more than 36,000 McDonald’s restaurants worldwide, this innovation alone would render hundreds of thousands of people jobless. Besides that, robots can play leverage against the average employee, causing a significant reduction in their wages and incomes. In A CNN article (McFarland), McFarland draws up a very interesting comparison. He says that a hundred years ago, horses were the main means of transport, with many of them being in demand. Then came the car, which revolutionised transport. Now everyone has forgotten everything about travelling by horse. In his article, however, he says that only jobs that require a high school graduate are at risk.
There are, however, others who disagree with the idea of robots replacing humans. Robert D. Atkinson and John Wu are some of the people who were involved in research with the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF). They published a report (Atkinson, and Wu), that tries to disapprove the alarm that humans will be loosing all their jobs soon. They disapprove of the notion that robots can do all jobs. Their research shows that, clearly, robots can`t do all jobs. Secondly, they try to open the mind of the pessimist to the idea that even if one job is taken away, there might be a second or third job on the other side of the spectrum that is created altogether. They insist that humans should be more careful and not underestimate humanity. Robots do not create as many jobs as they take, but they create new occupations; they can do things that, without robots, are impossible. In conclusion, the true statistic on jobs taken by robots over five years, from 2015 to 2020, is only 0.25%.
All in all, I believe artificial intelligence, however good or advanced it can be developed to become, can never totally replace humans. The argument of the threat towards the human workforce has been quantified well by research done by Robert D. Atkinson and John Wu. I, however, still believe the threat that machines pose towards the human workforce is great but can be beneficial at the same time. Humans have always shown the ability to come out and bring out great innovations when they are under threat. World wars, for instance, are the reason behind so many innovations, most significantly nuclear power. Now, submarines, ships, aircraft, and national power grids run on nuclear power. I can see machines posing a threat to the human workforce, but I believe that what makes humans human is their ability to do the unexpected, be unpredictable and, most importantly, change. Artificial intelligence has the ability to replace humans in the workplace, but that does not mean that men are jobless. Humans can innovate and do so many things that robots do.
References
Williams, Alex. “Will Robots Take Our Children’s Jobs?”. Nytimes.Com, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/style/robots-jobs-children.html. Accessed 18 Apr 2018.
McFarland, Matt. “Robots: Is Your Job At Risk?”. Cnnmoney, 2018, http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/15/technology/jobs-robots/index.html. Accessed 18 Apr 2018.
Atkinson, Robert D., and John Wu. “False Alarmism: Technological Disruption And The U.S. Labor Market, 185002015”. SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017. Elsevier BV, doi:10.2139/ssrn.3066052.
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