Pre-reading tasks
New technologies seldom completely replace a job worldwide. Instead, they tend to take over parts of jobs. In 2012, 159,346 robots were shipped for use in factories worldwide, with 70 per cent going to China, Germany, Japan, Korea and the USA. Although this has created jobs for engineers and computer scientists, there is a general fear that technology will take away far more jobs than it will create. Is the job you want likely to be replaced?
Task A
Kevin Kelly, one of the writers mentioned in the text, talks about the types of jobs that machines will eventually do. Think of at least one job for each category.
16.1 – Human |
16.2 – Machine |
|
16.3 – Existing jobs |
Jobs today that humans do-but machines will eventually do better. | Current jobs that humans can’t do but machines can. |
16.4 – New jobs
|
Jobs that only humans will be able to do at first. |
Robot jobs that we can’t even imagine yet. |
Task B
While you read, highlight indications of the writer’s point of view. After reading, check with a partner to see if you agree.
- Does the writer provide supporting evidence: facts, statistics or references?
- Does the writer ignore evidence that would support a different point of view?
- Does the writer back general statements with evidence in the form of examples and explanations?
It’s easy to tell when a new technology has reached critical mass- discussions over its long-term effects start kicking into overdrive. That’s happening now with robots and how they are going to affect the human job market.
Conventional thinking has always held that automation and robots have historically been good things because when a machine takes over a task, the human who used to do it is forced to do something smarter and better. This has had traditional repercussions both great and small, from auto assembly line workers necessarily having to upgrade their skills or maybe even start their own businesses, to regular people simply not having to remember minutiae like phone numbers because machines do it for them. Machines have traditionally freed our brains to worry about other, more important stuff.
However, in a recent 60 Minutes interview, MIT professors Erik Brynjolsdson and Bruce Welty raised a worrying issue-that robotic development has now reached the exponential phase, which means that machines are taking over human tasks faster than humans can come up with new and better things to do.
“Right now the pace is accelerating. It’s faster we think than ever before in history,” Brynjolsdson said. “So as a consequence, we are not creating jobs at the same pace that we need to.”
By that estimation, robots will eventually take over all human jobs, leaving us with nothing to do. This is very bad, says the New York Times· Paul Krugman, because that means all wealth will be controlled by the people who own the robots (assuming the machines don’t tum on us and kill us all, of course):
Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people- including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.
Wired writer Kevin Kelly, on the other hand, takes a more optimistic approach when he says that we can’t even imagine the jobs we’ll create because of this increasing automation. Humans’ role in the future will thus be the same as it is now: to create jobs that only people can do at first, with those tasks eventually falling to machines, whereupon the cycle will keep repeating.
… If there’s one thing we can be certain of when it comes to the future, it’s that it’s very difficult to imagine. As Kelly puts it:
Before we invented automobiles, air-conditioning, flat-screen video displays and animated cartoons, no one living in ancient Rome wished they could watch cartoons while riding to Athens in climate-controlled comfort. Two hundred years ago not a single citizen of Shanghai would have told you that they would buy a tiny slab that allowed them to talk to faraway friends before they would buy indoor plumbing. Crafty AIS embedded in first-person-shooter games have given millions of teenage boys the urge, the need, to become professional game designers-a dream that no boy in Victorian times ever had. In a very real way, our inventions assign us our jobs. Each successful bit of automation generates new occupations- occupations we would not have fantasized about without the prompting of the automation.
Where Krugman’s thesis falters is in the notion that it’ll somehow be big entities that own the robots. With even children creating their own Lego robots, that’s highly unlikely. Robots are getting better and cheaper, which means that everyone is likely to benefit from the robotic revolution. (583 words)