Monday, March 10, 2014

Technology and the minimum wage

we live in a modern world and theres no doubt about that. The advent of technology in the past decade or so has been absolutely immense considering where we were and where we are now. With technology we also see a conflict. It is now actually the era of machine vs man as far as working space is considered. lets take this into context,  a century ago laborers would have been high in demand for traditional factory jobs and work of a manual kind (the kind of work that in this day and age would earn you the minimum wage) and in this century, as technology more productively (and cheaply) makes available to entrepreneurs higher profit margins, why would they hire minimum wage workers.
for example, if a machine can do the same work a worker does but say the machine costs 5 dollars an hour while the worker costs 7.95 dollars (minimum wage in ohio) would a sensible entrepreneur not prefer the machine over the worker?Granted human effort cannot be substituted completely and the human mind in this day and age will triumph over the artificial one, is technology progressing to the point where soon AI might overtake humans as a whole?what will be the result?what will happen if laborers as a whole went out of existence?Technology actually is a double edged sword when it comes to long term economic consequences (potentially speaking)

5 comments:

  1. Technology have both impacted our society both positively and negatively. On one hand, technology have enabled our society to manufacture and produce goods and services faster than ever before. Consequently, technology have also taken labor jobs that once were in high demand for. Technology have impacted our society more positively then negatively. For example, due to technology, our infrastructure's better than it was a century ago. Our world is more unified, connected, and our life expectancy rate have increased dramatically in the last decade.

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  2. I think that there will be no slowing down to the progession of technology. So we as a society have to adapt around this notion. The manufacturing jobs will be filled by machines which are cheaper to opperate. It is then our job to see this occurance, increase our education and apply ourselves to jobs that a machine simply can't do yet.

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  3. I think concerns of technology rendering labor redundant are silly. Technology can certainly replace manufacturing (as we have seen it do since the advent of the industrial revolution) but AI is a long way away from taking over management positions and the service industry. So, while the skill level of the labour force will certainly rise with the betterment of technology, we are still safe and secure in our service sector jobs, I think.

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  4. I think that throughout history, we have become more technologically advantageous and we will continue to improve our standard of living and we will find more ways to create more jobs. I don't think this is an issue we should worry about, I think this is an issue we should embrace and continue to advance and find ways to flourish.

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  5. I agree, there is no doubt that we live in a modern world. Technology has impacted the economy in both a negative and positive way. I always thought that there was a human connection in doing business, and I still feel that way. So in my mind I think there will always be a need for people in business world just with the help of machines.

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