Technology has transformed from simple innocent entertainment to necessities in everyone’s lives from the ages of 2 to 102. Technology has innovated and improved the way we live, entertain, work, as well as learn over the years; and although, people engineered it, we might have created a species we might not be worthy to compete with.
From medical advancement to electronic checkouts, dependence on other humans is diminishing quite quickly. Years ago people would travel to places like Detroit to work for the automotive plants and make enough to support a family. More commonly today people are being bought out or laid off as the companies attempt to transform their factories and plants to work entirely without human assistance. People are outraged about not losing their jobs, and they protest for their work places to not convert to the new way of robots and automated machines. But these machines work faster, harder, and cheaper than manual human labor. How are humans supposed to compete with that?
Kiosks and self-checkouts are also trendy machines popping up everywhere. Kiosks can do everything from selling movie tickets to printing pictures for you. They can take the jobs of cashiers in most settings, as well as photo developers. They can count and distribute money faster as well as flawlessly, and they don’t need lunch breaks. Self-checkouts are mainly in larger stores where there are potentially lengthy lines of people with lots of items, but who’s to say this won’t change in 10 years and be how all (even small) stores operate. Instead of paying 15 employees to check out customers and 15 to bag items, they pay two or three people to assist those in a self-checkout line, which saves companies money. And, although self-checkout requires more effort from the customer, a lot of people enjoy or prefer this method of shopping.
Movies like "I-Robot" begin to feel more surreal as smart technology has certainly given us a run for our money, and machines have now even been created to not only act and work as humans but look like humans too. A smart hotel recently opened in Japan and is said that with the help of the robot employees, this hotel is saving energy, making labor costs more cost effective, and reducing waste. The hotel is equipped with a full staff of Japanese and American speaking robots for customers' convenience. They escort people to their rooms and even take their bags. The lifelike employees talk, gesture, blink and can even breathe.
Competition with technology is not just a problem in the work place, but in homes as well. Getting a child’s entire attention to focus on real-life interaction is almost impossible with the new high-definition video games, televisions, smartphones, tablets, and other gadgets. Parents are competing with "NBA 2k" and "Assassin’s Creed" as they beg their child to do the simplest of chores or even go outside to play. The average teen spends seven or more hours on their phone a day consuming social media and texting. Even smaller children are beginning to be hooked on cell phones and tablets. Companies like Amazon and Nabi have recognized the high demand for technology among children and have even given us the liberty of purchasing children sized tablets marketed for ages starting at toddlers on up. Today time-outs and spankings are less common within households, and punishment has shifted to limiting and confiscating gadgets such as the ones listed above. Some studies recently have found that threatening to take away electronic items is a more effective punishment than threatening to take away desert. But who needs sweets now that you can play Candy Crush.
Tablets and computer games are often targeted at children as learning tools. Homeschooling websites and programs are becoming more common for school aged children these days, giving public, private, and charter schools more competition. With this new advancement in technology, classrooms and teachers will be needed less and less, and possibly in the future not at all.
Although there are some negative aspects to robots, machines, and technology, let’s not forget how much they do make our lives a whole lot easier, and although creating robots to preform our usual ways of work might reduce a lot of jobs available for humans, it also opens more jobs for humans in other fields such as engineering and research. We as humans are on the top of the food chain in many aspects, and we have created such well-oiled machines that we might have potentially made ourselves obsolete. And, while there is an endless possibility to what technology can do for us in the future, we can never be sure until we humans can design something that will be able to tell us.
