Man vs. machine

 There are fewer jobs today and machines are partly to blame. Sure, a dramatically increased population size is also a major factor but still, when you can have 1 piece of technology doing the work that 10 people could have done, then you don’t really need those 10 people, do you?  But what happens to them? Does the system find some other job that they can do and machines can’t or do the just fade into unemployed oblivion? It’s happened before in the 1800s during the industrial revolution, and it’s kept happening and escalating ever since. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not by any means technophobic. In fact, I’m the kind of person who feels lost when I wake up and my internet connection isn’t working! Sad, but true.

    Today I read an article about 3D printers. Basically they are like the ordinary printers everyone knows, only that they can print actual usable 3D objects based on a design created on a computer. 

A 3D printer

 As of now, they can be used to print machine parts, automobile components even dental crowns. The hope is that in the future, almost every house will have one and instead of buying stuff like dishes or toys etc, you could just order them online and click print and then they get printed right there in your living room. This has a lot of advantages like: Decreased manufacturing cost, convenience, decreased carbon footprint (Because you won’t need trucks to transport said products all the way from the factory to a retail store). It all sounds really nice and dandy. But then I thought, what happens to the factory workers and truck drivers now that they’d no longer needed? Because at the current rate of global population growth, we can’t possibly afford to have jobs disappearing.

   The other day I was having a similar discussion with a class-mate of mine. There are a lot of drugs that med students need to learn and memorize. A lot! And not just the names of the drugs or their classification, but also: how they work, side effects, drugs they react with, types of people who can’t take them. Oh and did I mention the amount of the drug to be given and whether it’s in tablet form or it can be given as an injection.  So I had an idea which I explained to said class-mate: If one day we could have touch-screen panels in all hospitals, and on these panels all a doctor would need to do would be to type in the diagnosis and medical condition/allergies the patient has, then they’d get an instant list of all the appropriate drugs to give and there’d be no need to memorize all those drugs! But my class-mate responded by saying that doctors would then become obsolete since any lay person (no offence) could key in a disease and know which drug to give. That made me pause. As-in point taken! Sure there are probably lots of other situations that would need trained medical expertise but still the possibility of being phased out of the system was just too much.

   So basically this is the conundrum that our leaders will eventually be faced with: How to encourage progress without possibly inviting societal collapse. I just hope that they start thinking about it early enough.  And know that this whole post has been kind of heavy but it’s just a thought and who knows, it might not even happen that way!

Ciao!!!