Jared Strong

Automation through the power of machinery has been happening dramatically

since the Industrial Revolution. Throughout primary school I was taught about the
people of the Industrial Revolution and how new machines took many lower-skilled
labor jobs and the people were required to move to other areas of work. Some of these
jobs included many weavers and cloth workers at the beginning, eventually leading to
new ways to refine iron and steel. I learned how people flocked from the farms to the
cities to work for hourly wages and to maintain and operate the new machinery.
Recently while searching through the internet, I found many articles talking about the
new self-driving car technology. Self-driving vehicles are being researched by
companies like Google and Tesla and may soon be sold to consumers. Amongst this
talk there was a lot of fright about what will happen to the industries like taxi drivers and
truck drivers. This new automation, the automation of driving, will lead to many people
losing their jobs, just like many of the machines led to people losing their jobs in the
Industrial Revolution. This made me ask the question: will further automation hurt the
economy?
I took to the internet to help me answer my question. First, I looked for where
automation is currently coming forward. One area was in the shipping industry,
especially on the ports. With the global economy constantly growing and shipping being
even more important, there is often congestion in the ports from the large loads and not
as efficient ways of dealing with these loads. According to a joc.com 2016 article, the
automation of ports will speed the processes of shipping, which will get products to their
needed places faster, keeping things on schedule. This will help the economy by
allowing ships and their cargo to avoid the congestion that often occurs at ports. This
automation also appears to not remove many jobs, there will still be advisors required at
the sites to watch the machines and operators for the new machinery. It will also
address many current safety concerns currently found on ports because humans will no
longer be in the way of things being moved. So although there is a lose of a few jobs, It
appears to me that this will help the economy overall by making things faster and more
efficient. In an economist article titled Automation and Anxiety it talks about how these
new forms of automation are similar to the Industrial Revolution. The article goes
through the jobs that will be lost but then presents the jobs that may be created, giving
the hope that we need to have as we look towards the future. Automation will change
the economy, but it will make things easier and will also create jobs that we could have
never imagined. So to me this means that automation is doing what it is supposed to
and what its always done. But this led me to wonder if there will be too many jobs
destroyed and not enough jobs will be created.
In the Automation and Anxiety, article it says, A computer that dispenses expert
radiology advice is just one example of how jobs currently done by highly trained whitecollar workers can be automated, thanks to the advance of deep learning and other
forms of artificial intelligence. (The Economist, 2016, p. 3). This shows that this time

may actually be different from the times of the industrial revolution. These new
machines, like my example with the new self-driving cars, are becoming smarter. In the
article, A.I. Downs Expert Human Fighter Pilot in Dogfight Simulation (McDonald,
2016), it talks about how the new machine thinking technology is able to beat a trained
dogfight pilot. This further explains to me the new dangers of this new wave of
automation. This may lead to even human pilots being replaced, changing the defense
industry. Although humans will still be needed to lead the AI-led planes, there is a
significant less amount of people that will need to be employed. This may hurt the
economy by causing more unemployment in even more regions. This wave of
automation appears to be different because of the huge number of jobs that are being
able to be replaced. I began talking to my friend about my question and he led me to the
video Humans Need Not Apply. (CGPGrey, 2016). This video showed me the
importance of the dangers that current automation, especially automation that can be
done in the next few years, has on the economy. It depicted that this revolution of
technology is different from the rest. The other advancements have never produced
something that can think for itself. All past technologies required human oversight or
operation, but the new technologies can run themselves. As the AI gets smarter and
learns even more there will most likely be robots that can repair other robots. This
completely destroys the need for any human interaction in most processes.
With this I started to ask, What a world without work would look like? Much of
todays society, capitalism especially, revolves around people doing work to make
money. I started a search for some ideas and came across an article on the atlantic
titled Would a Work-Free World be so bad? (Strauss, 2016). In this article, Ilana
Strauss shows two different ways that the world, following the rise of AI, could be run. I
see in it either a wasteland of the poor people dying off, either from depression or from
lack of money, while the rich hold all of the wealth, or one where the governments give
people a living wage. This article discusses how society, and the economy, will need to
change to focus less on work and more on fun and play. Without needing to do much
work, there will not be many jobs available throughout the world, and people often feel
the need to work in order to be satisfied with their lives. If we, as a society, were to
change to not put as much emphasis on work, but more emphasis on doing things we
enjoyed, people could still find meaning in a world without jobs. However, I can not see
this being a possible future, at least until society changes. So what will happen once the
wealth gets polarized? I went to discuss this with my friend, who has worked on many
robotics projects and done research on this subject. We decided that in this possible
future, one where the rich hold all the money and the poor have nothing, that eventually
the poor will all die out, leaving the rich in the world. This is almost a type of natural
selection, where the people more adapted to survival, the rich, will survive while the rest
die off.
Throughout my journey through this subject, I have been taken from the idea that
this AI revolution is much like the Industrial Revolution to realizing that it is a completely

different subject. The Industrial Revolution saw the rise of machines that created more
jobs, as operators and repairmen, but the new rise of AI may lead to many jobs being
destroyed and, although some jobs are bound to be created, there will most likely not be
a way for the economy to return to how it has always been. A world without work, a
world where money is polarized, and a world where technology does anything, will be a
very different world than the one that we have known throughout the past hundreds of
years.

Sources:
"APM Terminals Ups Ante on Automation." APM Terminals Ups Ante on Automation.
N.p., n.d. Web. 04 July 2016.
"Automation and Anxiety." The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, 25 June 2016.
Web. 30 June 2016.
CGPGrey. "Humans Need Not Apply." YouTube. YouTube, 13 Aug. 2014. Web. 30 June
2016.
Kottasova, Ivana. "Smart Robots Could Soon Steal Your Job." CNNMoney. Cable News
Network, 15 Jan. 2016. Web. 04 July 2016.
McDonald, Coby. "A.I. Downs Expert Human Fighter Pilot In Dogfight Simulation."
Popular
Science. Popsci, 27 June 2016. Web. 06 July 2016.
Strauss, Ilana E. "Would a Work-Free World Be So Bad?" The Atlantic. Atlantic
Media Company, 28 June 2016. Web. 04 July 2016.