Baldone: BP’s attempt to quell future claims is ‘horrible’
July 19, 2011
Floyd Toups
July 21, 2011
For the past century it has been a theme for novels and movies, technology takes over and prompts doom for humans.
In 1909, E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” reflected concerns of that time when some people believed the industrial revolution meant the demise of agricultural-based societies and ultimately humanity.
Terror advanced with the introduction of motion pictures and science-fiction films such as “Forbidden Planet” (1956) in which machines developed independent thought. Computers in the 1975 film “Rollerball” held the sum of all human knowledge, and “Maximum Overdrive” (1986) saw machines terrorizing humans as the earth passed through the tail of a comet.
Today, many people who have experienced job loss during the past few years contend that robots and computers have replaced them. Others insist it is simply a transition period as the workforce, which for nearly a century was mostly modeled by manufacturing, transitions into technology.
Automakers started using computerized assembly lines decades ago. Medical science has taken technology to the point that surgeries can be performed without the use of a scalpel.
Bank ATMs and online customer service has reduced the need for tellers, as customers are able to transact business virtually any time of the day or night.
Checkout lines have not gotten any shorter at the grocery store, but self serve bagging has become as common as pumping one’s own gasoline.
Online services offer information and tools once performed exclusively by highly trained human professionals. Artificial intelligence software helps lawyers compile and deliver documents at a fraction of the cost from when legal assistants had to sort through stacks of paper and add up overtime hours.
Broadcast news saw human monitors replaced by software that can route information based on keywords and symbols being installed into programs.
In the 1950s, sit-down restaurants gained competition from the drive-in.
Today, McDonald’s is test marketing touch screen computers to replace people asking if you want that order super sized.
No doubt, the personal computer has afforded business an opportunity to reduce workforces and control expenses. However, the changing ways that people appear to make a living might be more motivated by fear than fact.
“Folks can talk about job loss to automation, but really things aren’t quite that simple nor quite that bad,” Nicholls State University economics professor Morris Coats said. “Sure, robots or whatever might replace some people, but the people who stayed [with a given company] are still employed, working with that equipment and have more productive jobs.”
Plenty of bloggers make assertions that computers pushed them out of work, but no verifiable or credible data could be found to justify their claims. Others identify it as a sign of progress and ask when the last time was that one saw a blacksmith working downtown or an ice wagon making its rounds through residential areas?
Coats, along with other economists and historians contend that anytime there has been a dramatic shift in how a social group functions economically, some people are left behind while others do what is necessary to make a change.
“Think about going out and plowing a field with just a fork,” Coats said. “You and a mule and a plow can do better. You and a John Deere can do a whole lot better. So if you are producing more, even though 100 people were plowing before and are out of a job, that just makes them available somewhere else.”
Coats describes a capitalist economy as one that flows. It has its peaks and valleys. History verifies that premise. Employers will always go for the least expensive manner in which they can conduct business.
“If we keep everything just the way it was at some wonderful earlier day, we have no road to expansion,” Coats said. “We stagnate.”
A century ago, factories were relatively new in many parts of the United States. They underwent adjustments, including those that prompted safe work environments and equal opportunities for workers, but they also received a great deal of criticism from those that swore the nation would starve as more people moved from the farms to cities to find work. “We are seeing the same [today],” Coats said.
If it were not for technology, Coats said, many people with advanced skills would never have developed them and the bulk of our population would be scratching the ground with forks. That would be a scary story.
Some people believe their jobs have been lost to technology while others contend that computerized systems being used in the workplace simply afford humans an opportunity to change their skills with the times. MIKE NIXON
