When I was a child, my impression of what the future would be like was incredibly distorted. Flying cars, robotic housekeepers, and intelligent machinery---something straight out of the Jetsons---comprised my perception of “the future.” The older I got, the better I understood that, frankly, these ideas are unrealistic. Interestingly, Kevin Kelly, author of Why Robots Will---and Must---Take Our Jobs, suggests that automation will be a commonplace process within the century. By “automation,” Kelly is referring to the idea that humans will create intellectually capable machines, or machines that have the ability to learn, in order to complete detailed and complex, yet miniscule processes. The overall purpose of Kelly’s article is to argue the
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Before he begins to defend his argument in depth, he prompts his audience to contemplate one scenario: “Imagine that 7 out of 10 working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they do?” I think that Kelly’s method for engaging the audience is textbook. However, as the author delves into his argument, he begins to make claims that never ended up being supported by compelling evidence. The line of claims manifests when Kelly blindly remarks “It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation.” After reading this, the task of glancing through the next ten pages becomes a search for undisputable evidence, but one eventually finds that Kelly didn’t include much. In fact, I found a source that explains---with evidence---just the opposite of what Kelly asserts. Ironically, this article was published in Wired, the aforementioned magazine which Kelly co-founded. It is titled “The Great Tech Panic: Robots Won’t Take All Our Jobs,” and it is authored by James Surowiecki, who suggests that, if automation actually was occurring like some suggests, that two economic trends would be noticed: aggregate productivity would rise sharply and jobs would be harder to come by (Surowiecki). Surowiecki ropes his audience back into reality by reporting the fact that productivity rates in the last decade have been uncharacteristically low, growing at a measly rate of a 1.2 percent a year. To combat the other side of the argument, Surowiecki states that the unemployment rate is under 5 percent, and that states are reporting trends of labor shortages rather than surpluses. With information like this so readily available, one thing is clear: Kelly did a poor job of supporting his logic with anything that could be considered reasonable
Before he begins to defend his argument in depth, he prompts his audience to contemplate one scenario: “Imagine that 7 out of 10 working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they do?” I think that Kelly’s method for engaging the audience is textbook. However, as the author delves into his argument, he begins to make claims that never ended up being supported by compelling evidence. The line of claims manifests when Kelly blindly remarks “It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation.” After reading this, the task of glancing through the next ten pages becomes a search for undisputable evidence, but one eventually finds that Kelly didn’t include much. In fact, I found a source that explains---with evidence---just the opposite of what Kelly asserts. Ironically, this article was published in Wired, the aforementioned magazine which Kelly co-founded. It is titled “The Great Tech Panic: Robots Won’t Take All Our Jobs,” and it is authored by James Surowiecki, who suggests that, if automation actually was occurring like some suggests, that two economic trends would be noticed: aggregate productivity would rise sharply and jobs would be harder to come by (Surowiecki). Surowiecki ropes his audience back into reality by reporting the fact that productivity rates in the last decade have been uncharacteristically low, growing at a measly rate of a 1.2 percent a year. To combat the other side of the argument, Surowiecki states that the unemployment rate is under 5 percent, and that states are reporting trends of labor shortages rather than surpluses. With information like this so readily available, one thing is clear: Kelly did a poor job of supporting his logic with anything that could be considered reasonable