Man Vs Machine in the Work Force

Man vs. Machine

What if you were to go to work one day and find out that your boss had fired EVERYONE? Better yet, what if you then went home that same day and found everyone sitting in the living room with the same news of being let go?

As technology expands more into our work place, it may have a great effect as to whether we have a job or employment in the future. Robot nation, by Robert Bain states that, “people are generally said to be lazy and always looking for the easy way to do things”. Technology has answered this aforementioned quest by making machines that are able to do our work for us. Examples of this are automatic mail sorters, McDonald’s hamburger patty flippers, self service line at grocery stores and even web sites like www.turnitin.com. Could this type of technology lead to our ultimate economic and social ending? How far should we take this technological help? Since we have robots/machines helping us with our jobs now, why don’t we just design machines to do our entire job for us?

Soon we will be faced with a moral and ethical dilemma concerning the use of artificial intelligence in our work place as technology reaches greater heights. I believe we need to limit the technology that we allow into our working and private lives as it will at some point go from a positive to a negative for us as a whole. I will give you a few examples of why we need to limit the technology we allow into our workforce. These examples include future effects on our economics, the negative aspects of a full robotic workforce also known as “human replacements”, the ethical/morality of the issue and a few thoughts from the people who defend and are for the replacement of humans for machines in our work force.

How will technology impact our economic situation? If we keep the technological pace that we are currently on in our workplace, our economy will falter to extreme levels never seen before. People are what move our economy by the exchange of currency. When machine replaces the need for our jobs that means we don’t have a job, if we are all unemployed then how will we obtain money? If we don t have an income or our income is severely cut then our economy will soon falter with the lack of trading.

Problems could possibly arise from a full robotic work force. A few years ago in California we had certain times in the day during the summer where we had to conserve energy by cutting power during the day. This would mean a complete work stoppage since power runs everything in machines. No work means no money for the money hungry corporate owners

Ethical and moral issues will soon come into play as we move machine based work forces. Let say for the sake of argument that we are all replaced and unemployed. How will we and our family’s survive? We will no longer be able to pay for the 3 basic necessities for human life: food, clothing and shelter. It’s my opinion that the negative effects could be severe. Without the essentials to sustain life one would need to turn to drastic measures such as murder, theft, etc. in order to survive.

Is it ridiculous to think that people would try to overthrow the government by taking over facilities to show their displeasure? It is possible if the government or leaders of our cities didn’t step in to solve this problem. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so people would turn to looting and vandalism of these job sites filled with the human replaced machinery in order to show their unhappiness or to get back at their former employers for taking their jobs and way of life away. This vandalism would also be used to get the essential products that they need and are not able to afford. What father wouldn’t break the law to help feed their starving family?

Speaking ethically