In lecture this week, Anezka talked about how AI and robots is the future, and that this technological advancement will greatly influence our student body’s lives within 10-20 years. This really resonates within me because I find it interesting how robots and AI are taking over basic jobs such as cashiers and servers. When I was in Japan, this especially shocked me: almost in every street restaurant, no servers are needed because customers just needed to select and pay their orders on a vending machine, and the chefs would receive the order through a computerized system.
This makes be wonder: if robots and AI are increasingly taking over the basic, easiest jobs that do not require higher education, the only jobs left will be those that require high levels of skill and study. This will have a negative impact on our employment rates and low-income families that can not afford quality education for their children. Unemployment will definitely become a huge issue as AI advances. The poor will find it even harder to get out of poverty with these low-level jobs that do not require high tuition education increasingly get taken over by robots.
On the other hand, there are human elements that robots and AI can never replace such as endless creativity, experiences, empathy, ethical evaluation, and inspiration. The problem is not that robots are taking over our jobs, but that maybe the majority of our jobs – where we are doing the same things over again and feeling no passion – is robotic. Perhaps humans are already robots themselves in their self-created system.
