Automation

I used to believe that the rise of automation would not wipe out entire industries of jobs. But, now that I have a better understanding of the way automation could be implemented in factories across the country I am not entirely sure. Several people in the World Without Work article shared my thoughts. At one point it seemed ridiculous to think that automation could be so widespread and successful, but as many companies have begun to take steps towards automation and have done so very successfully I do not think it is so ridiculous. I think automation usually marks positive growth in technology and so far, automation has often only served to make many factory jobs safer and more efficient for the human workers. It has only served to completely remove employees more recently. It was not until we started taking this class and Professor Bui pointed out that self driving cars could possibly wipe out all long distance driving jobs that I realized there were ethical concerns. I had not put much thought into the impact because I was mostly concerned with moving technology forwards and making driving significantly safer in that particular case. 

Now I have to agree with the idea that social theorists and ethicists should in fact be involved with the design process of automation in almost any field. Their outside opinion would look at more than just cutting cost and increasing efficiency. I think it is important that automation robots are not able to cause harm to humans which was also pointed out by the Robots article. That is something that I think relates slightly more to artificial intelligence, but it is definitely relevant. I also see that Amazon has said that their workforce has only continued to grow with the growth of their robots, but it does not seem clear that once the robots are in fact able to operate all of their factories they would need nearly as many workers. Now, I think it is a jump to say that all jobs will be eliminated by robots, but it is something to talk about because we do not need to get rid of all jobs to see widespread poverty and unemployment. If only all trucker jobs were wiped out, the economy would face a lot of problems. There are 3.5 million professional truck drivers and about 1 in 15 people is employed in the trucking business, whether they are directly driving or not. If this industry collapsed or sized down drastically the results would be disastrous. It would not matter if the cost of goods would drop slightly when several million people were no longer employed.

However, I am not an economist and I do not fully understand the effects of automation on the workforce, whether they are positive or negative. I think the collection of articles helped me understand that there is more to think about than just efficiency and furthering technology. The tech industry seems to play catch up with its social and ethical conversations rather than thinking about the issues beforehand.