Technology has been praised for the ease and speed it has added to daily mundane tasks. Just click a button, and it’s done.
For the past century technological advancements have improved our lives, but recently things seem to be taking a turn for the worst.
Technology is going beyond its intended purpose: it is replacing us. Our biggest competition now is no longer that gentleman or lady with a perfect resume and good credentials, it’s the machine that can type twice as quick, calculate in seconds, diagnosis symptoms and do your taxes.
It began with technology making time consuming tasks quick, storing tons of information and enabling ease of movement between long distances. It was logical to use technology then. Now, we have machines for everything.
Even with basic tasks that do not require a machine, someone somewhere became too lazy to complete a task and invented a machine for it.
It would not be surprising to find a machine that picks up the remote from the coffee table that’s a few meters away from the sofa.
Today, not all inventions can be considered true inventions, most have lost their ingenuity. They have become devoted to finding solutions for our laziness.
Many would argue to the contrary: that it is good that technology has allowed for inventions that make our lives easier. I would agree with this, but only to a certain extent. The inventions that have made our lives easier are those that were developed out of necessity. They make our lives easier when we use them as an aid; the success of the task depends on how we use our brain.
The problem with too many technological advancements is that there will always be innovations to inventions and this eventually leads to machines that think for us.
What more do you need if you can replace the human mind? Exactly: nothing.
By continuing with these innovations, people’s skills become obsolete.
Machines do our tasks for us now and are making us complacent. This problem is opening up the floodgates to a series of bigger problems that are already becoming evident: people’s skills are lost as businesses lay off workers to decrease costs and in place of these hundreds of people, purchase one or two pieces of machinery.
This is efficient where tasks are repetitive and mundane, but technology is now replacing professionals.
In every professional field there is some kind of advancement in technology that is threatening to increase unemployment in that field.
Take medicine for example.
People spend about eight years in college and medical school to become doctors, only to have their job taken up by a computer that can diagnose a patient with 99.9% accuracy.
Has it really gone as far as patients not even needing to go to a hospital to find out what’s wrong with them? They just get on their computer, go to a website and have a diagnosis complete with a prescription that can be ordered online and probably even shipped to their home.
Sure, it’s easy, but what happens when you’re the doctor whose job is now unavailable because of that machine?
You have wasted eight years of your life studying to be a professional with hopes of high annual incomes, only to be met with the same problem that faces many other industries: unemployment.
On top of that, you’re probably not well-off financially if you have just paid for school.
The cost of education outweighs the income you earn in the industry and this paired with unemployment gradually destroys an economy.
If machines are working for us, we earn no income. Since we are consumers as well, few people even have money for purchases, which leads to a decrease in aggregate demand.
Further along the line, it also results in a decrease in national income and a lower gross domestic product based on the income per capita for the country.
Since all professions now are threatened, we are between a rock and a hard place. If we aim to decrease costs and become efficient, we cause unemployment.
If we do not use machinery and keep our workforce, we incur high costs that decrease profits and may reduce national output, if it reaches a substantial level.
It seems like a lose-lose situation, but there is a solution: it’s called balance.
If we can learn to balance the use of machinery with the developing and sharpening of human skills, we can limit the negative effects of technology advancements.
We must allow humans to do their part for the economy, and apply machines only where necessary.
After all, necessity is the mother of invention; if we keep to this principle we can avoid problems we need not deal with.
Camilla Chebet can be reached at cchebet@spartans.ut.edu.