Excerpt
Index
1. Introduction
2. The changing working environment
3. How Robots replace Jobs
4. The new life-style
5. New requirements
6. Conclusion
7. Work Cited
1. Introduction
Robots are going to change the global economy drastically. With severe effects on the job market, as recent studies outline. In the United Kingdom alone one third of jobs could be omitted due to the “robot-revolution”, in the United States with 47 percent even almost half. Especially in “low-skilled” job fields robots could take many working spaces of human-beings, enormous social shifts would result. Even though a lot of people argue that technical advancement and therefore the further development of robotic devices bring advantages to our lives for the most part, we have to start to realise that robots may replace our jobs and therefore adapt to a changing work environment. More and more people are outcompeted by a non-living species an, unlikeable scenario that though will take place in the future and therefore people have to learn to deal with this new setting.
2. The changing working environment
According to the authors of the 300 sides strong study of the investment section Meryl Lynch, of the Bank of America, a paradigm change, regarding the kind how people live and work, is going to be imminent. Results of this development are significantly lower costs for companies and a significant tightening of the social gap. The study from which the “Guardian” quotes, assumes, on the basis of an analysis of the recent technological developments that machines could soon, besides manual works, also take over more and more mental jobs from human-beings. In addition to vacuuming or machine assembling robots could also take on analytical tasks that hitherto presupposed human-discernment, such as financial advisory services.
One of the most significant impacts is, according to the study, a massive reduction of previous jobs. In Great Britain for example, 35 percent of all jobs would be threatened by technology, in the United States 47 percent, as a study of Oxford University highlights. Most of them in the lower income area, what especially in the US, where recently a lot of jobs in this area have been created, would have tremendous consequences. Amazon for example has already automated large parts of its storages and substituted many workers through robots. In the future, the mail order company wants to unwind the deliveries of his goods also with drones; human delivery services would be obsolete. It is not only Amazon that is planning to execute future post deliveries with the help of drones. More and more national post companies are testing this kind of parcel supply. Not a long time ago it was almost unimaginable to think of cars that are able to drive on their own. Today Google has developed cars that are completely automated cruising through Californian streets. Self-propelled cars could make many jobs, in particular in the goods traffic, superfluously. Especially the job fields of taxi and bus drivers are probably going to be replaced by non-human beings in the not too distant future. Furthermore to expand these particular types of robots it is obvious that planes and ships will also be able to be commanded without the need of a human being. According to the Bank of America report the global market for robotic and artificial intelligence is intended to be 153 billion Dollars big in 2020. Almost about 45 percent of the manufacturing tasks are going to be performed by robots compared to only 10 percent today. One more not despising field where robots could substitute human-beings is the military. Within the next decade the huge amount of about 123 billion Dollars is going to be invested in military drones.
Furthermore another it has to be considered that Europe is due to the crisis Syria currently facing a tremendous amount of emigrants. Hundreds of thousands of new arrivals each day, asylum seekers and refugees, to provide work for them is a key aspect of integration policies. This is based on the conviction that our economy needs diversity and that the labour market which currently has a lot of unfilled vacancies can easily absorb these in the future. However this could prove to be a fatal miscalculation. As robots and machines are going to take those jobs which we wanted to provide to these people. Moreover this can lead to a really dangerous social situation where unemployment can cause upheavals in societies.
3. How Robots replace Jobs
Merrill Lynch expects that the productivity in some areas could increase due to rising automation by up to 30 percent. Yet the robotic era is just beginning. In Japan for instance robots work already unattended around- the- clock 30 days at a stretch. The Taiwanese company Foxconn, the world's largest supplier in the high-tech area, will replace a growing portion of its 1.2 million workers by production robots - 10,000 for now, a million within three years. The next generations of iPads and iPhones are probably no longer mounted by humans. Elsewhere, this new trend is becoming more and more noticeable. Vivek Wadhwa, a pugnacious and controversial economist from Stanford, comes to the same conclusion as experts in Oxford University. Currently considering the global average 66 robots occur per 10,000 workers, but in the Japanese automobile industry, there are already 1525 robots per 10,000 workers. In the Chinese province of Guangdong at present the first production plant is being built that requires no human-labours. Thousand of robots take over the work of approximately 2,000 people there. This trend will be increasingly seen within the next years, also in western countries. The reason: As the outsourcing of production to low-wage countries can according to the "Guardian“ save up to 65 percent of labour costs, 90 percent could be saved if people are replaced by robots. The same effect is achieved when computers are increasingly taking over knowledge-intensive jobs. Moreover it will occur, when 3D printers once allow us to print toys and household items at home, as well as mechanical devices, implants, jewellery and maybe even clothing. At this point of time 3-D printers only work slowly, cumbersome and messy, but this will change just as quickly, as it was the case with the first inkjet printers. For that reason one should not be surprised if in 2030 the industrial robots go against the 3D printer on strike saying: "They take our work away! “ One of the authors of the Merrill Lynch study, Beijia Ma, told the "Guardian", that, however, people must not be afraid of the developments. The people would need to invest more in their (further) training to get fit for the future developments.
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