Haris Khan

June 9th, 2021

ENG 131

Impact of Automation

As technology has advanced through the years, it has generally made human life easier

and better. One such has been automation. Automation is not a new technology, but rather

something that has evolved over time. When humans first began to use tools to hunt and farm

with far greater efficiency to constructing new forms of transportation to move themselves and

material further and faster, something that has always been consistent is that automation

augmented a person’s ability to do something. However, with the rise in robotic technology,

automation may now outright replace us. In some areas, jobs like cashiers, transportation,

manufacturing have been eliminated and replaced by automated workers. This has led to fears

of mass job loss as new automation technologies like AI become more advanced and capable of

doing more jobs. However, automation should not be viewed this way. It has paved a way for

new jobs and with AI becoming more prevalent, is able to achieve a degree of efficiency

unmatched by a human. Despite what some say, I believe that automation is not a curse, but

rather a blessing.

One of the major criticisms of automation is how it has the potentially to eliminate vast

numbers of jobs. The ones most at risk are ones that are repetitive. A cashier scanning items at

the checkout, a bus driver going on the same routes every time, or an office worker putting

numbers in a spreadsheet. As Martin Ford points out in his article about unemployment, "The
Truth About Unemployment—And Why It May Get Worse," new technologies really only effect

one employment sector which gives time to adjust and lets people move to new sectors (Ford

1). However, with automation, well over a hundred million jobs are at risk of being replaced and

the economy simply cannot handle a mass influx of unemployment on this scale. This ignores

however that mass job loss happens gradually, even in the most extreme cases. Eli Lehrer in

their article titles “Automation Will Increase Productivity, Not Unemployment” describes how

despite newer technologies increasing efficiency and therefore requiring less people, they have

created many new jobs:

“A $50 tablet sold in an airport vending machine has the processing power to do more

mathematical calculations more quickly than any human being, but the wide availability

of great computer processing power has actually increased the need for math teachers,

mathematicians, scientists, engineers and others involved with technology. The need for

vastly fewer people on farms (about 2% of the labor force today compared with over a

third a century ago) hasn't destroyed jobs associated with food, but instead helped to

create millions of new jobs in restaurants, food processing, and related industries.”

(Lehrer 1)

While there is no doubt that there will be job loss because of increasing automation and

perhaps even the number of jobs that are at risk is more than what Ford suggests, it is foolish to

think that the change will be immediate. On top of this, because automation is replacing some

jobs, it does not mean that new ones will not be created. With increasing reliance on robotics

there will be people who maintain, design, and develop them. Gillian Docherty in their article

“The Robots are coming… to create jobs and opportunities” describes how 15 million jobs are at
risk in the UK alone from automation, there will be new opportunities created by newer

technology. “A recent study by the Bank of England estimated in the UK, 15 million jobs could

be 'at risk' of automation. … However, the very sector so many fear will take over jobs is

actually helping companies find and deliver new opportunities to their workforce. “(Docherty

1). Companies can also shift workers to newer roles in Frank Levy’s book titled “The New

Division of Labor” he describes how many of these jobs that are perceived to be lost can be

recovered by companies putting the effort to retrain their employees (Levy 56). Similarly,

Andres Oppenheimer describes in “The Robots Are Coming! The Future of Jobs in the Age of

Automation” how jobs will not disappear but rather the work will change (Oppenheimer 72). All

of this shows that despite what skeptics of automation say, it will not negatively impact jobs,

but it will change the nature of them. Likely, the overall workforce will shift into higher skilled

one, leaving blue collar jobs behind while expanding white collar ones.

The increase in efficiency automation has brought cannot be understated. Like how the

introduction to farming meant that humans could support larger and larger populations,

automation will mean that people will be free to specialize into new jobs. On top of this, the

areas in which people are leaving such as agriculture and manufacturing do not see a hit in

production, but rather growth. For example, data from the Department of Agriculture shows

the number of farmers in the US over the past 100 years has dropped from approximately 14

million to about 3 million. Despite this massive drop in numbers, food production has increased

significantly to the point where there is such a massive surplus in production, there enough

food to feed the US several times over. This is mostly thanks to mass mechanization of farm

labor and the increase in efficiency it has created. The idea that a farmer would do manual
labor seems strange when nowadays machines can harvest entire fields of farmland at an

unimaginably fast rate compared to people working with their own hands.

Despite what critics of automation say, the benefits it provides cannot be understated

and its drawbacks are often highly exaggerated. Its ability to create new, higher skilled jobs

offsets the loss in areas such as service, manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture while

also seeing an improvement in the production and efficiency in those areas. Overall, we should

look towards these new technologies like AI and learn on how we can work in conjunction with

them rather than try to ignore them and the benefits they can and will provide.
 Works Cited

Oppenheimer, Andres, and Ezra E. Fitz. The Robots are Coming: The Future of Jobs in the

Age of Automation. Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New

York, 2019.

Levy, Frank, Frank Levy, and Richard J. Murnane. The New Division of Labor: How

Computers are Creating the Next Job Market. Princeton University Press, 2012.

“Farm Labor: Number of Farms and Workers by Decade, US.” Www.nass.usda.gov,

Ford, Martin. Technology and Automation Increase Unemployment. , 2011.

Lehrer, Eli. Automation Will Increase Productivity, Not Unemployment. , 2019.

Burnstein, Jeff. Technology and Automation Create Jobs. , 2011.