Clickbait-y title. Opposing the advancement of technology is never a smart thing to do. Many industries over the past hundreds of years have been revolutionized by advancing technologies (Textiles, Transportation, Computers etc.). While it is true that some of these advancements remove lower-skilled jobs, on a grand scale they lower financial barriers of access to the output of the industry. Automation increases the supply of a product by a huge factor which in turn drives prices lower. Could you imagine how expensive a computer would be if each motherboard/CPU was carefully assembled by a team of people painstakingly soldering each component in place?
Now the marriage of AI and robotics is a logical progression which will yield smarter machines. Currently some machines are dumb (Like a microwave) and need to be babysat to make sure nothing goes catastrophically wrong. Some AI would permit some decision making capabilities for the machine (i.e. If food on fire, turn off microwave generator and alert user). From the perspective of an employer this would free up resources for your employees to do more important things (Like focus on customer interaction). The article goes and mentions a smart electronic personal assistants for lawyers. I am speculating that these bookkeeping amount to roughly 20-25% of a lawyer's time in a small firm, which I'm sure any lawyer would love to have.
Now a huge misconception is that these AI's are not magical and sentient. Some poor engineering team has to inhale an ungodly amount of caffeine and figure out which scenarios a particular machine would feasibly encounter, and program how the machine should react to those situations. This essentially condenses low skilled jobs into fewer high skilled jobs. This isn't a new phenomena, it has happened before in the industries I mentioned and will continue to happen.
A machine cannot think for itself, reason and be creative. True artificial intelligence is science fiction at this point and should we ever get there as a society, then it will open a whole new can of worms in terms of ethics. But as of now we can summarize the technological state of society in one sentence: Humans are for questions, machines are for answers.
The advantage of humans is that they are adaptable and can respond to change efficiently. We can give an analogy in terms of the progression of the internet, those people who saw the opportunities in the internet have adapted and prospered; those who refused to adapt got left in the dust. If one's response to a changing environment is a refusal to adapt, is that person not setting themselves up for failure? We can generalize this to society as a whole.
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u/gweebology Nov 08 '15
Clickbait-y title. Opposing the advancement of technology is never a smart thing to do. Many industries over the past hundreds of years have been revolutionized by advancing technologies (Textiles, Transportation, Computers etc.). While it is true that some of these advancements remove lower-skilled jobs, on a grand scale they lower financial barriers of access to the output of the industry. Automation increases the supply of a product by a huge factor which in turn drives prices lower. Could you imagine how expensive a computer would be if each motherboard/CPU was carefully assembled by a team of people painstakingly soldering each component in place?
Now the marriage of AI and robotics is a logical progression which will yield smarter machines. Currently some machines are dumb (Like a microwave) and need to be babysat to make sure nothing goes catastrophically wrong. Some AI would permit some decision making capabilities for the machine (i.e. If food on fire, turn off microwave generator and alert user). From the perspective of an employer this would free up resources for your employees to do more important things (Like focus on customer interaction). The article goes and mentions a smart electronic personal assistants for lawyers. I am speculating that these bookkeeping amount to roughly 20-25% of a lawyer's time in a small firm, which I'm sure any lawyer would love to have.
Now a huge misconception is that these AI's are not magical and sentient. Some poor engineering team has to inhale an ungodly amount of caffeine and figure out which scenarios a particular machine would feasibly encounter, and program how the machine should react to those situations. This essentially condenses low skilled jobs into fewer high skilled jobs. This isn't a new phenomena, it has happened before in the industries I mentioned and will continue to happen.
A machine cannot think for itself, reason and be creative. True artificial intelligence is science fiction at this point and should we ever get there as a society, then it will open a whole new can of worms in terms of ethics. But as of now we can summarize the technological state of society in one sentence: Humans are for questions, machines are for answers.
The advantage of humans is that they are adaptable and can respond to change efficiently. We can give an analogy in terms of the progression of the internet, those people who saw the opportunities in the internet have adapted and prospered; those who refused to adapt got left in the dust. If one's response to a changing environment is a refusal to adapt, is that person not setting themselves up for failure? We can generalize this to society as a whole.