Rise Of The Robots: Technology And The Threat Of A Jobless Future
As development of technology, many robots are replacing human area these days. For example, restaurants are being automated by machine and other industry also being automated. Martin Ford (2015) describes the situation of widespread of robots and consequences. He also claims that spread of robots are serious concerns in many areas, such as employment, service industry, and economy.
The author truly points out the problem of automation sharply. I believe that developing of robots is not helpful for our lives and society. “The Automation Wave” is big part of our individual. Robots were not truly scared people’s job before. This is because they are lacking in sight and decision making. However, after Nintendo launched the Wii game, which include sight skills. In such a way, robots’ skills are developing enough to replace human’s ability. Many people will sympathize with this cause and consequences. As robots, be equipped as much as human or more than that, people cannot even compete with robots. This will lead to great impact in employment in society.
Rising of the robot also brings the problem in terms of education. People will not imagine that automation affects the education, it is. Algorithm is the one of technology that threaten high education needed jobs. It collects great amount of information more correctly and quickly than human. It also can save all the data to compare or analyze the work. This situation demands more education to people. Consequently, automation scared not only people who have little education but also high educated people. According to Ford (2015), automation will affect negatively in the service sector. “As the Momentum Machine device demonstrates” most of fast food restaurants will be automated. However, when I went to McDonald’s, even though there are vending machines, workers still work for wrapping the food and hand in to customers. Besides the machine, restaurants are still need workers. There is no restaurant which is fully running by robots or vending machines. Some parts of service can be replaced by robots, yet most of service sector still need workers, such as customer service industry, robots cannot sympathize with the emotion of people.
The main problem of growing technology is economic crisis. Since people’s incomes are decreasing because of removing jobs, losing people’s income by robots. As a result, they will also lose their opportunity to join the economy as consumers. Additionally, high technology can also initiate stagnation of mass-market economy. This is because, only high-income people can afford to participate mass-market economy industries, thus, there is a limit to keep running the economy only by wealth people. “If that mechanism continues to erode, we will face the prospect of having too few viable consumers to continue driving economic growth in our mass-market economy”. Likewise, evolving technology worsen not only inequality incomes but also stagnation of economy. As we know the most threatened jobs by automation is low level jobs which include more people than top level of jobs with high education and fine skills. However, also high-level jobs are tending to shrink. All job markets are facing danger.
Ford (2015) believes that government should enact a policy that support people who lost their jobs because of automation. He suggests form of income guarantee as solution to avoid joblessness. He wants a policy something that additive to low income people and motivate people to work hard. However, I think the best way to solve this problem is less automation. If the government solve fundamental cause of this problem, others will be solved sequentially. Automation is hurting our society in terms of service industry, joblessness, and inequality incomes.
This book truly explains reality and criticize rationally by giving various examples. I highly appreciate and sympathize the author’s arguments, However the solutions were not realizable and specific. If the solutions were further detailed, more readers can apply it to their daily life and understand easily. Besides, I recommend this book to people who do not know why automation has bad influence in our economy. They will understand easily and broaden their horizon and be informed about these serious economic problems.
