FollowThe future of humanity lies in how we decide to produce, engage with and manage robots. By robots, we can understand a large range of technological entities with artificial intelligence. Since the eve of the first industrial revolution, humans struggled with how to introduce technological improvements in production without hurting employees? Well, most capitalists thought that technological innovations will increase profit, but recently we started posing publicly the question of technological unemployment more often than ever if that will happen, how should we deal with it? The robots overtaking jobs are our friends or enemies?
Pew Research Center Internet Project asked many researchers about precisely this topic. The exact question was: “Self-driving cars, intelligent digital agents that can act for you, and robots are advancing rapidly. Will networked, automated, artificial intelligence (AI) applications and robotic devices have displaced more jobs than they have created by 2025?”
Pew Research Center undertakes some interesting projects. About a month ago Pew released a report concerned on what threatens the Internet.
Robots overtaking jobs, friends or enemies?
Almost 1.900 experts answered the open-ended question. Initially, Pew sent the question to more than 12.000 experts from all over the world. Three expert categories were formed. The first contained experts who previously participated in other Pew researches. The second was formed out of members of professional associations studying internet trends, among others. The third category represents regular the Pew Internet Project newsletter subscribers. Bear in mind that this is not a representative study, so the results cannot be generalized. Moreover, about 84 percent of the respondents said they live in North America.
The answers to the tricky question can easily be split in two opposing ideas. One is that robots will be a bad influence to the future employees, while the other opposes it. The first 48 percent of respondents think that the integration of robots and digital agents in the work field will increase income inequality. More than half, 52 percent, think that even if robots will take over some jobs prone to automatisation, humans will be able to find new ways of providing jobs and producing wellbeing, as we do have enough experience in the process so far.
One of the most recurring theme is that of education. Most respondents are concerned that the education system does not prepare students adequately for this fast-changing environment. There is a Henry Ford education in a Mark Zuckerberg world. We need to adapt to the new condition, the respondents warn so the robots overtaking jobs will help us, not threaten us.
