Topic: In this age of automation, many people complain that humans are becoming subservient

to machines. But, in fact, machines are continually improving our lives.

It is true that we are intensively dependent on machines in our daily lives, but this dependency

allows us to dedicate most of the repetitive and heavily labor required tasks to machines and

specialize ourselves in creative thinking. Firstly, machines are invented by people to achieve

efficiency, quality, and economies of scale in productions and to increase the levels of physical

comfort. Secondly, philosophers, social thinkers, and political activists believe that due to the

invention of automated machines, people are losing jobs to machines and their skills become

worthless. Finally, the benefits of machines to the societies cannot be ignored and exceed the

economical and welfare costs to the society due to the existence of machines.

By definition, a machine is a device that uses energy to perform or assist in performing any kind

of activity. So, machines do not have any creativity and perform in pre defined rules

programmed by humans. Thus humans are utilizing these machines to their daily lives for what

those are invented and are not obedient to or dominated by their own creation. For example, in

the past, farmers had to depend on nature to irrigate their farmlands and needed lots of time

and to do massive amount of hard works to cultivate their lands. So, they were unable to

cultivate huge amount of farmlands, and were greatly dependent on nature to meet the

demand for crops. But, these automated machines permit farmers to irrigate and cultivate huge

amount of lands altogether with ease.

From philosophical, sociological and political perspective, machines are unnatural, opposed to

the world of green territories and sunny skies. Human made machines are trusted over people

and are also replacing the humans in every sector of our daily lives. Once people are replaced

my machines, their jobs may disappear, skills become worthless and they are threatened from

increased competitiveness in the market. This point is weakening job security of people and

forcing too many people to specialize in few specific fields, which is also creating extensive

competition among them and increasing the number of deviants in the society. Moreover,

specializing in few tasks will lead to forget the conventional idea about and way of producing

the products and so on.

Precisely it is true that machines are resisted because effects to the societies, people, and

overall to the world are unknown and the industrial smokes from these machines are polluting

the green fields and sunny skies of the world. But it is also difficult to think that any single

invention in history, no matter how beneficial to society, did not make somebody worse off.

Benefits, which are provided by machines, far way exceed the economic and welfare costs to

the societies. Machines can be found everywhere from households to assist housewives to

factories. Machines, “such as – computers”, save our time, money and physical labor by

allowing us to buy anything or gather information by sitting at home. And it also allows us to

concentrate in creative thinking and specialize ourselves at our comfort zone. So, these

machines have contributed to make living standards and levels of physical comfort

immeasurably higher than at any time in the past.

References:

Mokyr, Joel. (1996, December). Man vs. Machines. Reason Magazine (Reason.com)