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Is technology advancing our world?
Technology can reduce us to a quivering mass of uncertainty.
Read part one of this article.
Then there are the just downright irritating examples of machines going where one would prefer they didn’t.
A purchase at Tesco can see you being told by a friendly automatic checkout lady - in a curiously un-Irish accent mind – to “Please take your change” over and over and over until you wish that robots felt pain, just so you could cause them some. After this delightful experience has you reduced to a quivering mess uncertain of your own sanity, ‘Robo-lady’ thanks you for shopping at Tesco. Why on earth anyone would want to be thanked by a machine is beyond me, but there you go; technology is constantly becoming all the more bizarre.
And about the machine’s accent: on second thought, as much as much as ‘Robo-lady’s’ British twang annoys me, consider the more colloquial alternative: “Listen bud, would ya eva take yer bleedin’ change!” You can stay ‘Robo-lady’, all is forgiven.
Aside from simply being irritating, the Tesco experience also illustrates one of our technological adventure’s biggest implications: its effect on jobs and the workforce. After all, flesh and blood may well have once sat where an automatic checkout now resides.
A suspicion of new technology and its effect on workers is nothing new, however; the Luddites of the early 19th century smashed looms in the belief that new technologies would replace them as workers. So, is the advancement of new technologies good or bad for jobs?
Such a motion was debated by two leading economists, Paul Krugman of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and David R. Henderson of the Hoover Institution, in 1996. Krugman argued that technology has a negative effect on wages by forcing people into lower paid jobs. By his rationale, a technological advancement which increases productivity replaces a job which would have been needed to achieve the same level of output: in his own words, “an investment that would have added two jobs will now add only one, so there will no longer be enough jobs created.” And so, the threat of unemployment will allow employers to lower wages and will result in worse, lower-paying jobs, despite a stronger economy.
Henderson, however, argued that while wages in the U.S. peaked in 1973 and are now lower, several important factors often aren’t taken into account. According to him, when improvements in quality and the ‘Wal-Mart phenomenon’ are accounted for, real wages in the U.S. have actually risen significantly since the 1970s. He reasoned that the technology which has slashed communication and transport costs has allowed supermarkets to sell goods at a fraction of the price they used to sell for in small shops. These savings and improvements in efficiency have, according to Henderson, allowed wages to go much further than they used to.
Interestingly, while the two economists disagreed over technology’s effect on wages, both said that, in the long-term at least, technology did not lead to a reduction in jobs. It seems that technologies which increase the profitability and size of companies can only lead to more jobs in the long run.
Accurately assessing the impact of technology on our lives is like trying to stop the sea eroding a pattern in the sand. Its effect is so multi-faceted and complex, with so many nuances and variables, that true comprehension is out of our reach. Technology has altered our lives beyond recognition and, as products of it as much as it is of us, we cannot step outside of it and observe it without bias.
One could say that technology is simply a tool and that how we use it is up to us, but even that seems uncertain and an overstatement of our understanding. For we do not simply use technology; it is not simply a blank canvas on which we paint. Technology uses and influences us too, and in ways we will probably never fully understand.
By: John Power
