Essay on Technology vs Labor in The Workforce

When he stated that The ultimate promise of technology is to make us the master of a world that we command by the push of a button, Volker Grassmuck must have foreseen the conflict that would occur between the humans and the machines in the future (O'Connor 44). His perspective is deeply rooted on the increased automation of the work in almost all the sectors that are brought by Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is clear that the automation of more work will lead to more loss of work, but at the same time, it is expected that the enhancement in technology will create more jobs. The concept of versus human labor in the workplace, therefore, become a controversial matter. The big question is, should humans allow machines to replace them at the workplace or should people work with the machines? To answer this question, one must focus on the big picture of how the technology in the workforce is influencing the lives of people across the globe. Technology will not replace human labor in the workforce, but instead human will work side by side with the machines to increase job opportunities, enhance imagination and efficiency and improve optimization and transformation.

Humans working alongside the machines at workplace will increase the speed of solving problems through the performance of massive work, reducing chances of humans making errors, minimize the time of handling problems while creating new job opportunities. Automation has been a serious concern in the business across the various spectrum with the main anxiety in the future machines such as smart cars, smart homes and other sophisticated machinery that will use artificial intelligence to perform various activities. The advancement in technology and automation of work increases fear with most people expecting to lose jobs as machines take on more and more jobs that were previously performed by humans. Humans should not be worried about the integration of technology at work because it will increase their efficiency and problem-solving capability. For instance, in the field of medicine, doctors and healthcare officers will work hand in hand with the machines to improve the problem-solving capacity. The machine will be used to perform scans of patients body parts and give the doctors hints of the possible illness. The doctors and health care workers will immediately use the obtained data such as scans and use it to treat patients. They can also use the same information to in their future investigations. Since machines in the field of medicine will focus on obtaining data and analyzing it, doctors will have higher chances of making quick decisions and will spend more time on their patients. In such a case, humans need to work hand in hand with the machine and at no one instance are machines likely to replace humans. A study conducted in the UK indicated that since 1990, technology has increased job opportunities in the field of nursing and healthcare by 909% (Allen, "Technology Has Created More Jobs Than It Has Destroyed, Says 140 Years of Data"). Technology at workplace will also increase productivity. As such, more job opportunities will be created as machines take on laborious, repetitive and most complicated tasks while humans focus on the decision-making aspects. For instance, technology has increased productivity in the areas of education and professional services. In the UK alone, technology has increased employment by 580% in the education and professional assistances sectors since 1992 to 2014 (Allen, "Technology Has Created More Jobs Than It Has Destroyed, Says 140 Years of Data").

Collaboration between the machines and humans at workplace will increase innovation as human imagination is combined with the capacity of the machine in solving work-related challenges. The rapidly accelerating technology has changed the workplace dimensions in most sectors. Embracing machines fosters human talents and effectiveness, strengths and outcomes through human-machine collaboration that allows the elimination of limitations of each other (Chiang, Ethan and Patricia 12). For instance, technology at the workplace has extended and will further extend human capacities in the areas of data analytics and machine learning through the artificial intelligence. In addition, humans keep making machines even better so that the technology can be able to deal with the new challenges. Humans become innovative in the process as they use the information they have to lay out strategies to cope with the current challenges and predict on the challenges that are likely to come in the future. For instance, as humans handle more discerning tasks in their interactions with the technology, it has become possible to develop computers that can recognize human faces, listen and read (Chiang, Ethan and Patricia 18). Such improved computers are being used in solving problems at most call centers where humans are aligned with their machine co-workers for better services.

For human-machine integration to bear optimum transformation and optimization, there is a need for an introduction of apprenticeship program that will enable the machines to understand where, when and how to help humans through adapting to the dynamic human environment (Gombolay 75). Through the introduction of such a program, machines can learn sequencing and allocation of tasks at the workplace with both wait and deadlines constraints. In turn, the humans can learn ways of developing heuristics and strategies from the machines in order to disseminate more information effectively that will eventually ensure optimized and transformed workplaces activities. The human-machine collaboration can also improve transformation of workplaces through dynamically enabled adjustment of both the machine and human agency and the optimization of the entire firms goals while maintaining the humans at the governance and oversight positions. On the other hand, the machines can enhance the decision-making support system by keeping track of humans decision-making strategies thus being able to predict the most appropriate future decisions that should be adopted at the workplace. Such conclusions are reached following an intensive analysis of past and present voluminous data and using the past strategies of decision making. The collaboration of technology and workforce, therefore, provides increased streamlining services, real-time business insights, and new business outlook as a result of transformation and optimization of overall workplaces operations.

Although there is a notion that raising an eyebrow against work automation is ignoring the signal of change, there is need to face the truth that machines can work quicker, longer and be more accurate than humans. Since the changes have already taken place and human cannot take the machines at the back of the office, humans should come into an agreement with some relationship between technology and labor force (Susskind, Richard and Daniel 117). Otherwise, machines will replace humans at the workplace. Vardi, a computational engineering professor, had foreseen this, and he warned by asserting that People are approaching the time when machines will outperform humans in almost every activity (Knapton, "Robots Will Take Over Most Jobs Within 30 Years, Experts Warn"). Facing this reality with an open mind reveals that it is challenging to have humans working side by side with the machine because it would be difficult to determine which tasks to allocate to humans and which to assign to the machines. Also, machines can work faster, more accurate, longer and more efficiently than human beings. Consequently, machines will become superior to humans at the workplace with time and undoubtedly, they will take the place of humans in the organizations. If machines will replace humans in all the positions in the workplace, does it mean that people will have an opportunity to pursue their leisure and have their lives flow normally and smoothly? The answer to this question require human beings to remember that all the machines are human-made, they operate under programs created by people, and therefore they can lead to loss of jobs, increased creativity and imagination accelerates the insecurity and optimization and transformation will result in loss of skills and originality.

The increased machine use leads to reduced job opportunities and in some cases, the employees wages remains the same regardless of the increase in productivity (Georg, and Michaels, "Robots at Work: The Economic Effects of Workplace Automation"). The increase in productivity has therefore not been positive to all the workers. Employees may not, therefore, appreciate the need for such collaboration between human and collaboration as they see it as the sources of long-term misery. Besides, studies indicate that the increased use of artificial machine will reduce the job in the US by 47%, the UK by 35%, the Republic of China by 77% and OECD by 57% (Williams, "Robots Will Steal Your Job: How AI Could Increase Unemployment and Inequality"). As Ms. Solis notes, the United States has lost more than 5.6 million jobs over a period of 10 years (2000 2010) because the companies are producing almost the same quantities and qualities with few employees as they would have produced when they had many employees and few machines. Technologies such as 3D printing and the installation of robotics systems are accelerating this rate of job losses in the United States and mostly affecting people with low-skills (Cocco, "Most US Manufacturing Jobs Lost to Technology, Not Trade"). The reduction of the jobs by the increased adoption of the machine at the workplace is significant because it puts low-level skilled jobs at risk, hence there is need to address it early enough to secure adequate jobs for future generations.

Increased creativity resulting from the human-machine collaboration puts the security of the workplace systems at a great risk of insecurity (Nguyen 161). As human being embrace the machine use in all the sectors, it is apparent that most people rely on these machines to perform all the tasks, such as the storage of the information. Due to the increased creativity, some malicious people are engaging in cybercrimes that have led to significant loss of personal and organizational data, loss of money as well as intellectual property. Insecurity is a vice that is rampant in the 21st century has been brought about by the increased human creativity. Consequently, many businesses have suffered great losses rather than the benefits they have gained as a result of increased human-machine interaction. When negatively used, the creativity arising out of human-machine interaction can cause devastating losses that can hardly be compared to the benefits accrued from the creativity. In some extreme cases, such creativity resulting from human-machine interaction brings businesses to a standstill especially when the systems are hacked, or their systems destroyed.

Human-machine interaction has contributed to a significant optimization and transformation of workplaces to a working machine zone, leading to loss of human talents, skills, and originality (Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew 166). Since machines at the workplace are taking almost every task that was initially being done by humans, people are hardly developing their talents. Initially, people would engage their talents at the workplace as a way of getting better ways of approaching tasks. Nowadays, most employees depend on the machines to work for them and to some extent trust the machines almost entirely that they can hardly propose alternatives. Besides, there is a significant loss of skills as people strive to learn skills of running the machine. This is disadvantageous because some crucial skills such as craftsman have been disappearing at an alarming rate. More so,...