Artificial intelligence and its implementations has enables the human race achieve tasks better and more efficiently than ever before, the rate at which it is growing however it will replace human rendering them unemployed. Over the years, men have worked so hard in innovations however so ironically so as to try and create their perfect replacement. Artificial intelligence is basically the development of machines with capabilities of doing complex tasks that would ordinarily need a human being to perform. This Intelligence extends to tasks up to and including; visual perception, recognition of speech, language or dialect translation and ultimately the decision-making. The machines have now been used in everyday work station. Where one would need a guard to secure entry, finger prints 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 over 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 attends college at Yale university to study radiology in the hopes of getting the 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 him. 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 is raised by several others in the industry like Bill Gates, Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking.
Martin Ford, in his new book has Rise of the robots has stated his concern that robots are going to overhaul the economy. He takes note of the the robots developed by a company Momentum Machines that can flip a McDonalds burger in 10 seconds. This to him was not a good innovation but a troubling one. With more that 36,000 McDonalds restaurants world wide, this innovation alone would render hundreds of thousands of people jobless. Beside that, robots can play leverage against 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 of how a hundred years ago, horses were the main means of transport with many of them being on demand. Then there came the car that have revolutionised transport now everyone has forgotten everything about traveling 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 human. Robert D. Atkinson and John Wu some of them. In a 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 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 sides of the spectrum that are created all together. They insist on the fact that humans should be more careful and not underestimate humanity. Robots do not create as many jobs as they take but they create new occupation, they can do things that without robots are impossible. In conclusion, the true statistic on jobs taken by robots over 5 years 2015 to 2020 is only 0.25%
All in all I believe artificial intelligence however good or advanced it can be developed to become, it can never totally replace human. The argument of the threat towards the human workforce has been m quantified well by the 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. The world wars for instance is the reason behind so many innovations like most significantly, nuclear power. Now submarines, ships, aircrafts and whole nation power grids run on nuclear power. I can see machines posing a threat to the human workforce but I believe that what makes humans humans is their ability to do the unexpected, be unpredictable and most importantly changing. The artificial intelligence has the ability to replace humans in the work place but that does not mean that men are jobless. Humans can innovate and do so many things that robots.
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.
