Where will technology take us all?

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We find ourselves in modern society where people slowly shift and invested many aspect of their life into a small a device called smartphone, the practicality that technology offer to human life and how many efficiency value it contributes towards the progress of society, ranging from small business to interconnection network of many people and activities like shopping, working, telecommunication, entertainment, information seeking all can be done just within this small device.

This very practicality of technology making individuals to be more and more independent from the need of societal system, the need for real life socialization may be replaced by digital social network application where you can literally communicate with several different people at the same time in a more lively manner, or shopping via marketplace with more choices, indulging visuals without having to really go outside wasting energy, time and maybe saving transportation costs.

Psychologically speaking we do enjoy to communicate via social media or browsing through internet because of how efficient all of it can be done in a matter of time and also it is due to the fact that as time goes by and we value efficiency more and more maybe because of how stressful our job can be and how many responsibilities we have to bear, and activities need to be done. Shortly, all these positive values of technology although may be the enabler of higher individual productivity but it may come with side effect such as Individualism (which is not necessarily bad).

The "maybe" Unintended Side Effect

The benefits of technology right now outnumbered the negative side effect but as soon as the trend for job market has shifted it can also be an economic catastrophe for many whose skill are irrelevant to the market. Generally speaking it seem like the gap of high skilled individual who contribute to the fast growing advancement in tech is making the gap of tech development vs the growth pace of labor skill.

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We can see on the image above, how it only took more or less a century from the first electricity introduction to assembly-line of industries revolutionizing auto mobiles to where we are right now with the development of AI, Internet of Things (IoT), Robots, etc.

As technology evolve the demand for the tech related job also increase, as according to US bureau labor statistics, employment in computer and information technology occupations is projected to grow 13% from 2020 to 2030, faster than the average for all occupations. These occupations are projected to add about 667,600 new jobs. Demand for these workers will stem from greater emphasis on cloud computing, the collection and storage of big data, and information security.

Image Source : as written in the image.

As what have shown on the figure above, perhaps job with highest growth since 2018 will be on the encryption and cyber-security and followed up by cloud computing, these are highly skilled & specific job that can only learnt via proper education and yet on the other hand based on the Future of Jobs Survey 2020, we see that many of these followings job involving human labor will get reduced per share of tasks hour basis

Image Source : as written in the image.

As written in the image above, between 2020 - 2025 many of these jobs will involve more of machine for better efficiency, so human will have to focus more on the emerging market and following up the job market trend to survive the employment as some of the job get increased and some job get decreased. We see that technology will eventually replace the automate-able job like repetitive tendency job human do.

Image Source : as written in the image.

and the problem with keep up with all the job market trend is ultimately the skill gaps in between the labor market, this rapid development of technological advancement may outgrow the preparation for the future of labor themselves. In the future, companies may also consider replacing human over robots for cost and operational efficiency reason, skill is helpful but human productivity limitation is part of the game, and as the future comes, human work value will be concentrated on the ability to do problem solving skills, analytics & creative thinking.

"The recently published paper, “Robots and Jobs: Evidence from U.S. Labor Markets,” by MIT professor Daron Acemoglu and Boston University professor Pascual Restrepo, PhD ’16, finds that industrial robots do have a negative impact on workers.

The researchers found that for every robot added per 1,000 workers in the U.S., wages decline by 0.42% and the employment-to-population ratio goes down by 0.2 percentage points — to date, this means the loss of about 400,000 jobs. The impact is more sizable within the areas where robots are deployed: adding one more robot in a commuting zone (geographic areas used for economic analysis) reduces employment by six workers in that area.

Overall, robots have a mixed effect: replacing jobs that relatively high-wage manufacturing employees used to perform, while also making firms more efficient and more productive, Acemoglu said. Some areas are most affected by the mixed impact of robots.

“In the U.S., especially in the industrial heartland, we find that the displacement effect is large,” he said.

“When those jobs disappear, those workers go and take other jobs from lower wage workers. It has a negative effect, and demand goes down for some of the retail jobs and other service jobs.”

- Source : mitsloan.mit.edu

So the unprepared condition toward the fate of millions of worker and the increase of uncertainty for human may be the negative "side effect" challenge of ever-growing role of technology in society. Yes, there are positive value of automation technology where everything can be produced with less resource and less time,

however the replacement of human labor means the long term economic landscape will never be the same as more and more people being unemployed the purchasing power goes down, how would government deal with such situation?

Less than 5% of occupations are 100% automatable, according to estimates. However, 30% of the work involved in most jobs could be carried out by machines. For the overworked employee, a reduced workload sounds attractive.

The future will be automated and augmented. Some roles will be entirely redundant. Many will be replaced in part and complex tasks once considered too difficult to automate are being performed by machines. Automated systems generate complicated medical diagnoses and treatment plans; algorithms create detailed, responsive exercise program and artificially intelligent therapists offer patients low-cost programs to overcome social anxiety.

Employment in high-income, cognitively demanding and creative jobs is likely to increase. While up to 20% of a senior executive’s role could be automated. Much low-income, manual work will still require human workers.

The greatest risk is for people in low-income manual work and medium-income work, in which the majority of the tasks are clearly defined and repetitive. More roles will become supervisory, Paradoxically, work may become less effortful but more tedious and fatiguing.

Source : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/automation-automated-job-risk-robot-bored-boredom-effort-fourth-industrial-revolution/

The Future of Humanity and The meaning

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People hardly having a good meaningful socialization in real life these days, in a sense our real reality we're living in only serve as temporary "city/town hall" (metaphorical for a common conscious dimension where we are all exists together). The City hall has become more and more fragile especially in the age of ever-growing technology of virtual world it could be the case that in the future the distinction between virtual world and real world may be indistinguishable with the augmented reality tech.

Today we live in a world where it considered as the "future" 40-50 years ago, however we can see how different society is compared to how it was. For those who born in 90's must have felt the steep transition of life within the last 20-30 years. We see that there are several changes in how we communicate and the evolution of value people look up to, in fact, globalization is one of the impact of technology which form this inter-connectedness of global society where social interaction can be done abroad instantly.

We can already see the effects of social media on the lacking ability to communicate with each other easily. Communication through social media doesn't train our body language, expression, intonation which is crucial emotional trademark we need to cultivate our empathy function.

Instead with social media and perhaps virtual world / augmented reality we may design our own fake looks and get impressed by other people fake looks, digital socialization may become even more interactive or can be regarded as the "utopia" of social interaction resulting in the lack of appetite to interact further in real world because people fall in love with illusion.

It is also about the degradation of value..

The degrading value and meaning in modern day lifestyle make people no longer think in term of what really valuable in life just pleasure-seekers because many works can be done instantly,

and this instant culture make hardship of work meaningless because there is no need to deal with problems for extended period of time. As mentioned above, the human work will revolve around problem solving, analytics & creative thinking, meaning people will more and more value relevant intellectual capability above anything else especially the one with logical thinking.

The degradation or maybe better say "the changing of value landscape" may cause some people to get depressed and lost, not knowing that life can be far beautiful and better perhaps by knowing and picking up values of their own.

The appreciation toward compassion among human being can be replaced by the "kindness" of technological help.

Once human reach their apex by technology perhaps merging themselves with robotic chips to overcome their biological limitation and some even modify themselves with artificial limbs and tackle down the problem of aging, the concept of compassionate act would be very different than our traditional value system which still highly inspired by religions teaching of altruism, self-sacrifice, compassion, love.

One possible scenario is that...

When human manage to eradicate their own flaws, they will no longer need to cooperate as they become more omniscience and omnipotent, suddenly there is minimum reason for cooperation,

& people will only increasingly turn more competitive, act of kindness will be rare as many people no longer need help, Even as what we're seeing right now people has become more individualistic and every act of cooperation will only based purely on short term individual "advantage" basis

But surely it doesn't mean human will turn into complete evil, it is just that human will become less and less care about others. The interaction between human-technology will increase as Robots can provide more sympathy/empathy and loyalty as accordance to individual needs. Technology like Internet of Things, Robotic servant, AI will become so human-like interactive and so customizable not only that human will feel the need to interact with technology for important and urgency needs, human may find entertainment and psychological needs all within robots e.g relationship/emotional needs, be it because people may low-key feel lonely and so on..

Imagine when you go to other place you can communicate with your smart-cars for route and destination,

when you want to google up some information maybe just ask siri or your google glass,

when you go home you may want to be warmly greeted by your robotic subordinate,

when you want to drink a tea why not just ask your robotic maid, or

when you feel unhealthy you can ask your toilet for fecal or urine analysis and consult

when you feel lonely you can talk with your robotic subordinate.

when you want to eat, call your robotic chef.

when you want to deliver goods, just send it with drones.

See.. how automated human life can be with all these technology

Even as for now we have witnessed some psychological counseling already involves chatbot and some may find dating app with bots to be more fun and entertaining. The Japanese anime also giving us clue as to how the world would be like if we can enter virtual world where you can meet your favorite character and actually interact with them or Japanese rental girlfriend prove how desperate for connection and lonely some people can be perhaps can be substituted by more emotional mimicking AI.

Humanoid Robot - Human Relationship

In the future, Humanoid robot will look exactly like human designed to make real human feel safe and familiar with their accompany, we will have difficulties finding differences between robot and human which can resulting in non-differentiation between human to human relationship vs human-robot social relationship, the concept of human-robot marriage may become more mainstream in the future, and some people may even consciously choose to have deep romantic relationship with robot over human.

So..Where are we going? according to me.. Many of human jobs will disappear and some new job will arise, people get unemployed. The changing landscape of economy will be inevitable,

People will likely to get less in touch with real reality as virtual world may replace the need to go work outside, and the lesser distinction between virtual reality of any kind or real reality will make it harder to differentiate which one is illusion and not.

Social interaction will drastically change.

The appreciated value within society will also evolve, intelligent will be valued more and more than empathy. Human to human relationship may get decrease so is birth rate probably at that point, people may have more alternative to reproduce by artificial womb and external fertilization

also with technology there will be selective breeding and government or people can choose the biological advantage of baby and predict their rate/probability of success in the future

Society will become more and more identical with assembly line for human fate. It is sad if that's the case, it is indeed not too late for human to take action to prevent the possible dystopian scenario.

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