An Increase in the Use of the Quality of Technology - Research Paper Example

An Increase in the Use of the Quality of Technology Introduction Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the fear of erosion of jobs by the use of new technologies has always prevailed. The temporal dislocations of labor have happened numerously. There are two sides to this argument; one being that the use of technology has not caused any reduction in the availability of job opportunities to the people while the other being that use of technology directly reduces people’s access to jobs. This paper explores both sides of the argument. Technologies that paved the way for new kinds of work made certain jobs obsolete, thus overall increasing the productivity as well as prosperity without affecting the employment rate negatively. The reduction in job opportunities caused by technology is short-lived while more benefits are gained over the passage of time. Use of technology has not reduced job opportunities It is correct that machines have replaced workers, but this has been seen ever since the cotton gin. Over the passage of time, use of technology has only caused the incomes to increase and has caused new kinds of job opportunities to surface. Farm equipment introduced in the 20th century caused many people to be unemployed, but nobody would want to destroy that equipment to put those unemployed people back on farms when they have found greater fortunes for themselves having travelled to the industrialized areas and cities. Across short spans of time, the business cycle’s ups and downs have driven the ups and downs in the availability of job opportunities to people. According to a chart that draws comparison between the real output over the last decade in the US and the aggregate hours worked in the last decade by the nonsupervisory workers, with both variables being indexed to the levels of the year 2001, increases in productivity are real but the co-variance between the series is tremendous (“No, Technology Is”). The big rise followed by a fall and then another rise in the duration on job done by people is caused by a similar rise, fall, and rise of the demand for services and goods. This essentially means that the demand of jobs is consistent with the demands of goods and services. Almost half of the labor force of the US in the 20th century was displaced by machinery in the agricultural sector (Suede), but the periods of high unemployment that were encountered in the 20th century were not caused by the advancement of technology. An example of the way in which technology has filled the void of unemployment is the creation of new kinds of job opportunities by the Internet. With the availability of the Internet, people are working from their homes to earn money. For a considerable part, use of technology has only changed the ways in which works are performed rather than causing a decline in the availability of job opportunities. Many companies like Amazon and Barnes & Nobles have established businesses online. However, the software are still being administered by humans. Technology is a tool rather than a mind. Every piece of technology requires a mind to be used, and that mind is still human. Technology has only helped people flourish. Many underdeveloped countries have become rapidly developing countries in the age of technology. China is a potential example of that. Around fifty years ago, China was an economically weak and underdeveloped country. China rapidly advanced over the last five decades, that was the age when many different kinds of technologies kept emerging from time to time. “[T]he growth in China’s per capita GDP in the last 30 years is better explained by changes in the world that have enabled China to benefit from its labor resources — most notably lower transaction costs due to technological developments and, no less importantly, a different global order of trade” (Hayat). People of China, today, are far more self-sufficient because of the small and medium enterprises and businesses they have established using technology than they were ever before. The void caused by lack of job opportunities that was created as a result of the use of technology is also considerably filled because of the improved productivity that results from the use of technology. In the past, when many different kinds of technology that are available today were not around, the productivity of work was lower. This meant slower progress of work and accordingly, lesser work in a certain time period. With the use of technology, the productivity has tremendously increased as a result of which, companies tend to find more work in the same time period, thus providing the interested candidates with access to more job opportunities than they had before in the same time period. People work for survival when they have no other means, but when their survival is ensured, their motivations for work change and they do not stop working. Likewise, when they are able to make more money in a given time period using machines than they did without machines, they would invest that money into other businesses thus creating more job opportunities. The more the profitability, the more the job opportunities. “Not until every single problem facing humanity as a whole has been solved would [an individual] be left without something productive to do” (Suede). In fact, there does not exist any direct relationship between job opportunities and technology. From the statistical point of view, the relationship between the direction in which economy is advancing and the demand of more work is more direct and even stronger. In spite of the reduction in job opportunities that has been noticed over the past few years because of the advancement of technology, high rate of unemployment is not anticipated to last long. “It’s also true that previous waves of automation have not, in the long run, led to mass unemployment” (McAfee). According to the MIT economist Peter Diamond whose work on market imperfections was rewarded with a Nobel Prize in 2010, “What’s different now is that the nature of jobs going away has changed. Communication and computer abilities mean that the type of jobs affected have moved up the income distribution” (Diamond cited in Talbot). In short, the problem of lack of unemployment that many countries around the world including the US have been facing over the past few years has occurred because of a myriad of reasons that are not integrally related to the automation of worker processes or the advancement of technology. If machines had been sufficient, no labor would have been needed ever since their introduction in the market. Had machines been a replacement of workers, this entire world would have been Utopia, with the abundance of robots offering people services, without the need for an individual to even lift a finger. In such a world full of fantasies, everybody would have access to everything required because of the abundance of every imaginable good and service. Use of technology has reduced job opportunities The famous philosopher Karl Marx has described the effect of use of technology on the availability of job opportunities to people in these words, “The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor of the workman himself. The self-expansion of capital by means of machinery is thenceforward directly proportional to the number of the workpeople, whose means of livelihood have been destroyed by that machinery” (Marx cited in Suede). For a long time now, rise of automation has been equated with a reduction in job opportunities and deterioration of the labor conditions. Marx has explained the effects of displacement of the English hand-boom weavers by automated loom referring to it as the worst tragedy in the history, that ranged over decades and came to an end in 1838, causing many people to starve to death (Suede). Although the rapid advancement of technology has, in many ways, created new kinds of job opportunities, yet new research has shown that the pace of deployment of workplace automation advances is more than ever before, thus raising challenges in the adaptation of the workers to get attuned to the changes (Talbot). More and more companies are using robots and software for the tasks that have long been performed by the accountants, production-line workers, and the clerks. The US saw a protracted unemployment crisis from 2007 to 2011. By the end of the year 2011, 6.3 million more Americans were jobless than what the number was by the end of the year 2007 (Talbot). In spite of this drastic rise in unemployment, the economic output of the US by the end of 2011 was more than what it was before the onset of the global financial crisis. Although the rise in unemployment in the US can be attributed to many factors including outsourcing, yet some of the factors that have played a major role in this include IT-driven automation and rapid advancement of technology. A potential example of the way advancement of technology has eradicated jobs is provided by photography companies. In the past, people used to go to the photographers in order to get their pictures made. The services of photographers were also taken to make videos of important life events like weddings, birthday parties, and other ceremonies. As the use of cellphones with built-in cameras became popular, people’s tendency to render the services of professional photographers to capture their important life moments and events has greatly reduced. These days, people use their cell-phone cameras to take photos and make videos; a function that was once solely performed by the professional photographers. As a result of this, the profitability of photography as a profession and the opportunities of employment for the photographers have decreased. Another example of the extinguishment of job opportunity because of technology is reduction in the need of retail staffers in Amazon.com. Likewise, clerks in the hotels and airports have been replaced by computerized kioks. Companies in the present age are using speech systems and voice-recognition software that has obviated the need of operators and customer services staff. A big adjustment is being made in many companies around the world with the integration of latest technology into the work. This adjustment would continue to be made till the time a new equilibrium has been found so that workers have new kinds of work to perform. Such adjustments have also been made in the past when agricultural advances, and electrification and factory automation systems were introduced in the market. However, since several decades have passed since those radical changes were introduced in the market, the power of certain kinds of information technologies doubles every two years or so. Although IT was introduced since the early 1980s, yet it took the companies almost two decades to make optimal use of IT and have the paper-driven workflows completely replaced by IT. Till the mid-1990s, job opportunities in the printing industry actually increased because of the incompetent use of the digital technology. For a few years thereafter, they leveled off, and ever since, started to decline. Jobs in the printing industry have been decreasing since the late 1990s. Since the year 2001, drop in the annual average employment in the printing industry has been noted to be 36 per cent (Rooney). From 2006 to 2008, the period was relatively stable as no significant increase or decrease in the job opportunities in the printing industry was noticed. The global financial crisis hit the printing industry, causing downsizing of the companies. However, the employment rate has been declining only slightly as the effect of the global financial crisis is wearing off. There are two important ways in which the advancement in digital technology has reduced the job opportunities in the printing industry. First, digital technologies have played an important role in the diversification of the ways in which information is delivered, thus causing a radical change to take place in the market in which the printing industry operates. Secondly, digital technology has helped increase the productivity of the industry so that fewer workers are now required to do the work. The rate of infringement of digitized labor into the modern system of economy is increasing while the phenomenon’s scope is not yet known. In the view of Andrew McAfee who co-authored Race Against the Machine, the economic pain countries are bearing today can partly be attributed to the global financial crisis in the US and that in Europe (Frank). However, as the global financial crisis is receding, the profits of companies in the US are increasing and the tendency of companies to spend on things like IT has increased. While many companies are spending more on research and development and in the integration of latest technology in the workplace, one thing that they are not doing is recruiting more workers. Since the Second World War, 2000s was the first decade in which the number of people working at the end was lesser than what it was in the beginning (Frank). Non-return of hiring is explained by the injection of technology into the economy at a rate that has decreased the need of employees. Conclusion This paper analyzed both sides of the argument, one side being that the use of technology does not cause a decrease in job opportunities while the other being that it does. A detailed discussion of both arguments leads to the conclusion that use of technology does cause the job opportunities to decrease, but history provides evidence that such decrease in the number of jobs is temporary and short-lived. It may take some years for new kinds of job opportunities to surface but they have always done. Technology has been just as big a threat to the people in the Industrial Revolution, if not more, as it is to the people in the contemporary age. However, the lives of those unemployed people as well as their generations changed for better as technology was integrated into the workplace. They were able to increase their productivity and consequently find more and new kinds of job opportunities awaiting them. The real benefit anticipating which more and more companies are integrating technology in the workplace is not the money saved by firing workers because their work can be performed by machines, but for the increased profitability of the business that results from improved productivity with the use of technology. It is not the jobs that have been lost; it is the nature of jobs that has changed. Before, there was no cell-phone industry while photography flourished. Now, photography is on a decline but the cell-phone industry is developing. Somehow, at every level, there has been an equivalent, if not more, compensation for the number of jobs lost with the use of technology through creation of jobs in almost every industry. It is the very use of technology that has helped nations prosper during the 20th and the 21st century. Work systems change with the use of technology, only to become better with time, and accommodate the needs of people better. Works Cited: Frank, Aaron. “Could Automation Lead to Chronic Unemployment? Andrew McAfee Sounds the Alarm.” 19 July 2012. Web. 1 May 2013. . Hayat, Usman. “What Explains China’s Economic Growth, And Is It Sustainable?” 6 Dec. 2011. Web. 1 May 2013. . McAfee, Andrew. “The Myth of the Myth of Technological Unemployment.” 23 Jan. 2013. Web. 1 May 2013. . “No, Technology Is Not Causing Unemployment,…” 2013. Web. 1 May 2013. . Rooney, Brian. “Technology Reduces Employment in the Printing Industry.” 23 April 2013. Web. 1 May 2013. . Suede, Michael. “Technological Automation is Not the Cause of Our Chronic Unemployment Problem.” 2012. Web. 1 May 2013. . Talbot, David. “"Tectonic Shifts" in Employment.” MIT Technology Review. 20 Dec. 2011. Web. 1 May 2013. . Read More