Annotated Bibliography
Greenhouse, Steven. “Driverless Future?” The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 21 Mar 2017. http://prospect.org/article/driverless-future. Accessed 6 Feb 2018.
In “Driverless Future”, Steven Greenhouse discusses the potential beneficial and adverse effects that self-driving cars will cause in the future. Greenhouse begins by laying out the two most talked about effects of automation: job displacement and safety increase. In terms of jobs, he asserted that there would likely be around 5 million people left without jobs because of automation. But, because drivers only make around $13 an hour, moving down to $10 an hour with a retail job would not have as much of an impact on them as it did the factory workers in the …show more content…
She remembers, when she was a child, seeing her father, an immigrant, work long hours in a factory, sorting out bottles with defects and fixing issues in bottle quality. She remembers her father working overtime so that he could give Michael and her siblings an education that would “put people like him out of work” (p. 6). Although automation technology is replacing more and more jobs every day, this is not necessarily the first time that jobs have been replaced with cheaper “do it yourself” options. Some of these options that Michael provides include the attendant at gas stations — which disappeared fairly suddenly and comprehensively — and self-checkout options like those at supermarkets. During the industrial revolution, machines were used to increase productivity and increase yield, and still needed people to make them work. With automation, these machines are replacing these unskilled laborers. Michael argues that replacing these low-end jobs with machines just widens the gap between unskilled and skilled workers. In the case of Uber, many taxi drivers joined because it was more convenient due to the flexible hours and feeling of self-ownership. But even Uber is looking to replace the “unskilled” drivers with cars that drive themselves. From Uber’s perspective, all of the money that went towards driver salaries is now pure …show more content…
My cultural artifact, self-driving Ubers, is mentioned in the article as one of the more disruptive innovations to the job market. It is becoming increasingly common for “unskilled “ jobs to be automated. In the author’s example about her father, she admits that she is glad that automation replaced her father’s job because she felt like it was a waste of his talents. So the question arises: is it worth it to replace human jobs with bots? Is there a threshold that should not be surpassed? Where is that threshold in relation to where technology is now? At what point is having a uniquely human interaction important? One of the points that was not touched on in the article was how the consumer would react to a driverless car. There might be some people who would prefer a driver to talk to, in which case Uber would actually lose customers to more “old school” companies. As Michael said, “There is something substantial lost when we opt for the non-human way. It means we are losing out capacity to learn by interacting with one another…”
Greenhouse, Steven. “Driverless Future?” The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 21 Mar 2017. http://prospect.org/article/driverless-future. Accessed 6 Feb 2018.
In “Driverless Future”, Steven Greenhouse discusses the potential beneficial and adverse effects that self-driving cars will cause in the future. Greenhouse begins by laying out the two most talked about effects of automation: job displacement and safety increase. In terms of jobs, he asserted that there would likely be around 5 million people left without jobs because of automation. But, because drivers only make around $13 an hour, moving down to $10 an hour with a retail job would not have as much of an impact on them as it did the factory workers in the …show more content…
She remembers, when she was a child, seeing her father, an immigrant, work long hours in a factory, sorting out bottles with defects and fixing issues in bottle quality. She remembers her father working overtime so that he could give Michael and her siblings an education that would “put people like him out of work” (p. 6). Although automation technology is replacing more and more jobs every day, this is not necessarily the first time that jobs have been replaced with cheaper “do it yourself” options. Some of these options that Michael provides include the attendant at gas stations — which disappeared fairly suddenly and comprehensively — and self-checkout options like those at supermarkets. During the industrial revolution, machines were used to increase productivity and increase yield, and still needed people to make them work. With automation, these machines are replacing these unskilled laborers. Michael argues that replacing these low-end jobs with machines just widens the gap between unskilled and skilled workers. In the case of Uber, many taxi drivers joined because it was more convenient due to the flexible hours and feeling of self-ownership. But even Uber is looking to replace the “unskilled” drivers with cars that drive themselves. From Uber’s perspective, all of the money that went towards driver salaries is now pure …show more content…
My cultural artifact, self-driving Ubers, is mentioned in the article as one of the more disruptive innovations to the job market. It is becoming increasingly common for “unskilled “ jobs to be automated. In the author’s example about her father, she admits that she is glad that automation replaced her father’s job because she felt like it was a waste of his talents. So the question arises: is it worth it to replace human jobs with bots? Is there a threshold that should not be surpassed? Where is that threshold in relation to where technology is now? At what point is having a uniquely human interaction important? One of the points that was not touched on in the article was how the consumer would react to a driverless car. There might be some people who would prefer a driver to talk to, in which case Uber would actually lose customers to more “old school” companies. As Michael said, “There is something substantial lost when we opt for the non-human way. It means we are losing out capacity to learn by interacting with one another…”