Will your work be replaced by robots?

Recently, Gu Ge has been working on robots in the field of artificial intelligence. He first signed an agreement with Johnson & Johnson to develop medical robots with artificial intelligence, and later announced that he has obtained a system patent for implanting specific characters for robots in the United States. The former is not new, whether it is the "Da Vinci Tools" robotic surgical system developed in the UK, or the "Crow" series of remote surgery robots that the US jun party has already put into use in the war have reached a fairly high level of technology. As for the latter, according to the relevant patent description, it is only a simple copy of the human behavior pattern, far from reaching the level of letting the robot have a true "character". We certainly don't think that such progress will lead to the demise of humanity. It is also annoying to talk about the threat theory of robots and artificial intelligence, but let's talk about a topic that is much simpler and closely related to everyone's life: your Will the work be replaced by robots?

This topic may sound a bit far away, but in fact, many Foxconn workers should already feel the competition from robots. Last month, Foxconn's parent company, Hon Hai Technology Group, announced that it would introduce thousands of robots to replace manpower to reduce labor costs. At the same time, Guo Taiming, the president of Hon Hai Group, revealed to the media that Hon Hai is ready to automate 70% of the production line within three years. He plans to replace the workers with robots to improve production efficiency. As early as 2011, Guo Taiming had a similar statement. Hon Hai will introduce one million robots to replace workers, and Hon Hai currently employs about one million workers in mainland China. From the perspective of economists and critics who focus on Hon Hai's industrial ecology, this plan will alleviate the labor shortage currently facing Hon Hai and reduce lao workers' disputes, so that workers can work from endless overtime and simple machinery. Get out of work.

Many optimistic financial commentators say that the popularity of robotics can free workers from monotonous, heavy, and even dangerous work environments, making workers' work and life more comfortable and dignified. As for the reduction in jobs that robotics can cause, many economists believe that lost jobs will be complemented by other aspects, such as robotics. This kind of thinking is often reminiscent of the plot in the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Charlie's father worked at the Zui First Toothpaste Factory and was responsible for screwing the toothpaste bag filled with toothpaste. However, in order to improve production efficiency, the toothpaste factory purchased a robot to screw the lid on the toothpaste. Charlie’s father lost his job and the family’s life was in trouble. However, after the film's zui, Charlie's father found a "better job", or the toothpaste factory that worked in the past, but was responsible for repairing the robot that took his job.

Of course, some economists have issued a clearer and firmer stance that even if unemployment occurs, it is normal. Mechanization and automation are the development direction of advanced productive forces. It is necessary to make sacrifices for this. In the British industrial revolution, there were cases where ordinary people who were taken away by machines rushed into the factory to fight the machine, but the historical trend of mechanized production was unstoppable. With the development and progress of society, new jobs will always emerge, and there is no need to worry too much about it. However, Eric and Andrew from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology don't think so. They argued in the book "Running with the Machine" that Rifkin's assertion about "the end of work" is that technological advances have made There are fewer and fewer workers needed to produce the same goods, and Zui eventually brings the number of workers closer to zero.

This is undoubtedly a disturbing conclusion that Eric and Andrew tried to solve this problem through "organizational innovation." They believe that the crowdfunding and crowdsourcing model represented by Kickstarter and Amazon's "Turkish Robots" will bring life to the United States, which is stagnation in median income. However, in China, the problems we face may be more serious. Among the unemployed in the United States, workers with secondary vocational skills account for a large proportion. Even so, there are still a large number of workers in the competition with the machine; and Chinese workers, especially migrant workers, come from Robots tend to be more vulnerable when they compete. They often don't have special skills. The only advantage is that they are cheap.

In addition, the problems of many second-generation migrant workers are even more serious. Many of them have even mastered basic agricultural skills and are more dependent on the convenience of modern urban life than their parents. In a sense, these young people belong to the city, and they have already had difficulty returning to the land. And as the process of agricultural mechanization continues to advance, even if they return to the countryside, it is difficult to find their own foothold. They will be a generation that faces the competition from robots. If they can't win from this competition, it will be a huge tragedy.

Although I believe that migrant workers will first face the impact of robots, it does not mean that professionals who engage in other so-called intellectual labor do not need to worry. The impact of technology comes from all sides, for example, the impact that online education can have on the profession of teachers, and so on. How to deal with the impact of technology is a question worthy of consideration for each of us. I don't know if there is any so-called "decent face" work in the world, but I know very well that there is nothing more likely to cause people to lose their dignity than unemployment.