Question

Should we ever try to slow down innovation or technological advances?

As we've seen throughout the history of America, the cheaper labor will succeed in automation and innovation creates new jobs. Like we saw in class, most newspapers feared the rise of "robots" or technology as they continually destroyed american jobs. Can we ask american people to stop creating or stop inventing to prevent the loss of jobs? Would becoming stagnant in our business pursuits benefit everyone, the workers, or no one?

Answer 1

Everyday new innovations and researches are taking place. People of Silicon Valley are thriving each day with developing technologies and with developing artificial intelligence and robots. Tesla's Elon Musk has even tried to warn people that in the future, robots will be replacing human jobs. The emerging technologies like robots and AI do put a fear in our minds about what would happen in future if all the human jobs are taken over by them.

Japan has the highest number of robots and robotic research, followed by North America, China, South Korea and Germany. There are computerised algorithms that are taking the place of human transactions. This rapid increase in technologies and innovations suggest that perhaps these might affect the human workforce at some point.

But on the other hand, humans have feared every new change in the past. There were people who disagreed with industrial revolution as well, but look how great that turned out to be. About robotic innovations also, people fear that they would get replaced by robots in future, but that necessarily won't have a bad effect on humans. There is chance that these robotic innovations just would make human work more easy or comfortable. Moreover, the world is run by humans, will humans allow these innovations to just take away human jobs like that?

As per a research about US , it was found that total US spending on robotics was $11.3 Billion and spending on pets was $66.75 Billion. That means the US isn't actually spending or investing that much on robotics.

Like when ATMs were adopted in 1970s, people had raised the question whether this would take the jobs of people, but today there are more than 400,000 ATMs in US and it has just made the work easy.

But if one believes that robots will take away their jobs in future, then what one can do in best is to educate oneself more and more. To study and research more about the industry they work in and to keep an eye on all the technological changes happening in their feild.

We cannot predict precisely about exactly what all jobs can robots and AI do in the future. Thus, there is a probability that perhaps new innovations are just to help humans with work. And rather we cannot just slow down the innovations fearing that they would take away our jobs.