Technology's Influence on Jobs and the Future of Work

This essay explores the significant impact of technological advancements on employment. It begins by highlighting the increasing trend of companies replacing human resources with technology, emphasizing the acceleration of the digital revolution and the merging of human and machine intelligence. The essay references Kurzweil's predictions about the future of technology and its influence on various sectors, including the potential for automation to eliminate white-collar jobs. It also discusses the views of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee on the effects of technology on employment rates and the elimination of jobs due to rapid technological progress. The essay further examines how automation affects the healthcare sector, replacing human jobs with machines, and the broader implications of automation across different industries, including agriculture and transportation. The conclusion emphasizes the need to be aware of the global conflicts and the environmental damage caused by technological advancement.

Running Head: TECHNOLOGY AND EMPLOYMENT
Technology and Employment
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1TECHNOLOGY AND EMPLOYMENT
The rapid evolution of technological advancement have made it convenient, rather
reasonable for companies to replace human resources with technology. The acceleration of
digital revolution is making the merging of human and machine intelligence possible. Since
computers today are capable of doing everything a human can do more efficiently, Kurzweil has
anticipated that the combination of human skill and knowledge with the capacity and speed of
technological creations will immortalize man. The predictions of Kurzweil have an uncanny
tendency of materializing in real life. He had predicted in a 1990 book of the Soviet Union’s fall,
claiming that modern technologies like fax machines and cellular phones will have the potential
to disempower authoritarian governments by controlling the flow of information. Although
Kurzweil has gained a notorious reputation in many circuits, he is quite amicable. He likes
working at Google as the vast financial resources of the company enables him to engage in
activities he otherwise cannot. Modern technology is capable of doing things that were only
thought possible in Sci-fi fiction and companies like Google and Tesla are making their due
contribution to the development. For carrying out the ‘Moonshot’ project, the company hired
Sebastian Thrun, who made noteworthy progress by pioneering the company’s venture into self-
driving cars. Supercomputers are effectively outdoing their human competitions. Additionally,
voice recognition and speech have made noticeable progress. Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri
and Google translator are getting better with each new installation. Technology will be
eradicating the need for white-collar jobs and Steve Lohr’s claim of computers being able to
mimic human reasoning in the near future is starting to make sense now.
Rotman, D. (2013). How technology is destroying jobs. Technology Review, 16(4), 28-35.

2TECHNOLOGY AND EMPLOYMENT
Erik Brynjolfsson’s finding that the advances in technology is largely responsible for the
increasing unemployment rate confirms the views of the previous article. The rapidity of
advancements in the world of technology is eliminating job opportunities faster than it is creating
them. McAfee and Brynjolfsson’s is of the opinion that although technology accelerates
productivity and is responsible for higher standard of living, it has negative consequences for
individual workers since it eliminates the range of jobs leaving the regular worker worse off than
earlier times. The organizations and skills are not keeping up with the innovations of technology
and there is anecdotal evidence of digital technologies threatening jobs (Rotman, 2013). Since
the beginning of the 1980s, computers have been taking over tasks like clerical work, repetitive
jobs of production and clerical work; all these provided a middle-class pay. Likewise, computers
also do jobs that pay higher and require high creativity.
Korzep, K. (2010). The future of technology and the effect it may have on replacing human
jobs. Technology and Health Care, 18(4, 5), 353-358.
Despite healthcare being a huge and fast-growing industry in the US, the emerging
technologies in the Healthcare sector have been cutting out jobs opportunities as per the Labor
Statistics. The article explores the field of Telehealth and reveals how the extension of the
industry replaces human employments with machines. The health industry has been a major
employment providing sector since the proliferation of medical science, but medicines these
days, are manufactured via technology. Even the medical tests, operations that were conducted
manually by surgeons and nurses are now operated by well-equipped machines, more efficient
than qualified medical practitioners (Karsh et al., 2010).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th3nnEpITz0

3TECHNOLOGY AND EMPLOYMENT
David Autor explains how automation eliminates employment. Machine perfection is
designed to replace manual labor and computer, he says, “were programmed to swap out error
prone, inconsistent human calculation with digital perfection.” Automation has increased the
scope of possibilities; it consumes less time for production and invents new services and
products with finesse. Although there will be the availability of jobs in market, there is no
denying that the requirement of human labor will plummet due to automation. It allows people to
do more work in less time, and makes them healthier at their convenience. On the other hand, the
speaker feels that individuals with high education can opt for high wage jobs, like engineers,
programmers, doctors and nurses since employment is robust in these sectors (Bessen, 2016).
However, low education jobs like cleaning, security, food industry are constantly opting for
technical assistance instead of employing labors, leading to massive employment shrinking.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/01/18/technology-has-already-taken-over-90-of-
the-jobs-humans-used-to-do/#62c6d94e1bdd
About a century back, agriculture was a chief source of income and farmer population
was a majority. The spread of technology has reduced the population of farmers to a minority.
Same goes with jobs related to local transportation, technological progress have eliminated
workforce in the railway industry. Even NASA has replaced manpower with computing for
calculating flight trajectories. Along with embracing the fact that technology has been a stepping
stone to unthinkable creations and reached milestones in innovation and productivity, people
must be aware of the global conflicts and the environmental damage it is continuing to cause.

4TECHNOLOGY AND EMPLOYMENT
References:
Berger, T., & Frey, C. B. (2016). Did the Computer Revolution shift the fortunes of US cities?
Technology shocks and the geography of new jobs. Regional Science and Urban
Economics, 57, 38-45.
Bessen, J. E. (2016). How computer automation affects occupations: Technology, jobs, and
skills.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/01/18/technology-has-already-taken-over-90-of-the-
jobs-humans-used-to-do/#62c6d94e1bdd
Karsh, B. T., Weinger, M. B., Abbott, P. A., & Wears, R. L. (2010). Health information
technology: fallacies and sober realities. Journal of the American medical informatics
Association, 17(6), 617-623.
Korzep, K. (2010). The future of technology and the effect it may have on replacing human
jobs. Technology and Health Care, 18(4, 5), 353-358.
Rotman, D. (2013). How technology is destroying jobs. Technology Review, 16(4), 28-35.