Thursday, November 7, 2013
The Foreseeable Future
Imagine a fully automated McDonalds. You drive up, hit a couple buttons for your order, and your food gets put together by machines. A McDonalds without employees. This could be in our forseeable future. Already, software and technology has started to replace many jobs. Google is even building a fully automated car. Hop in, select your destination, and enjoy the ride. When these cars become popular, we can say goodbye to taxi drivers and chauffeurs. One could argue that technology is destroying jobs. I would argue that technology is simply recycling jobs. Look at the technology job market and you will realize there are thousands of jobs that go unfilled. When agricultural advances came, such as tractors and sprinkler systems, many farm hands found themselves jobless. Most of the population used to work on a farm. As a civilization, we changed, and created more jobs. We can do the same thing. I'm excited to see what new markets and industries come to existence in our future.
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I think most people are just scared to learn new technology, which will hold them back in the future. We just need some more education advances, and then I think everyone will see your view as well.
ReplyDeleteI know I'm scared of the whole automated car thing. I don't mind some help driving but I don't want to turn control over completely while going 60 MPH.
ReplyDeleteI can easily see voice recognition being used to process orders at the drive through. Furthermore, why use a order booth? You could speak your order into your iphone and have it sent to McDonalds. I can see it being much more accurate at processing orders. Finaly, drones can deliver it to you while you are driving, (your iphone knows your realtime GPS location) you don't have to take any time out of your trip to order food.
ReplyDeleteI think we have a long way to go even though the technology might be there. Like was mentioned above I think cultural adaptation will take a while for some of those fun and exciting features.
ReplyDeleteWe tech people are pretty used to the idea of large societal change, such as the inevitability of low wage jobs going away, but I think sometimes we do ignore the human elements. A few months ago, I read an article about a technologist who was challenged by a journalist to go and talk with a customer service agent for the BART public transit system in San Francisco after he mentioned that BART should just be completely automated. The interesting thing that we ignore is how important it is for so many people in our society to have someone to talk to and how unnatural it would be to eliminate certain types of jobs. Ultimately, I think we will get there, but perhaps it might take a generation.
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