Resolved: The advacement of technology will significantly harm the job market.

A horse walks into a bar, and the bartender says, "Why the long face?" The horse says, "A machine stole my job." Of course, the horse didn't suspect that owning a car would become the norm. There wasn't the infrastructure or the money per household to support machines taking over the transportation market, but humanity is nothing if not lazy, so if a machine can do a job better than something else, we will use it. In this debate I'm going to be proving that technological advancements will, in the future, be a main cause for unemployment going up. That's how I'm going to measure a "significant harm," and I'm sure my opponent will find that fair. To substantiate this, I need to prove that in the business world it makes economical sense to replace millions of jobs with robot workers or innovative machinery. To further clarify, my goal is not to prove that machines will steal a lot of jobs and keep stealing them forever and ever. I simply need to prove a sort of significance, which in this case could be an unemployment spike for a period of several years. This is a sort of scary idea (but then again, maybe we should just give them all our jobs and never have to work again), but don't be too frightened. I'm sure my opponent will have some words of hope for you. Now on to my case. 1) They have in the past If video killed the radio star, then what killed the manufacturing workers? Refer to the video at the top. http://www.youtube.com... Of course, this isn't a surprising image. It's commonplace right? It's not shocking to only find two or three humans amidst this machinery. Their job is to make sure that the machinery isn't malfunctioning or attempting to take over the world. People don't build cars anymore in large quantities. Now refer to reference [1], and you may be thinking "Well yeah, but just look at the job shift from manufacturing to sales, business, and brokers like the insurance, finance, and real estate market." Granted, you have a point, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. First we need to consider why the machines took so many jobs. Points jump ones head like the following: -Machines don't take smoke breaks or lunch breaks -Machines can consistently lift heavy materials without medical concerns -Machines also don't have medical concerns -Maintenance on machines is fairly easy to plan for -Machines don't want a 401k or health insurance or other benefits -Machines aren't paid hourly, you just make payments on them, which means you don't pay overtime -Machines don't form unions -Machines don't complain -Machines can work faster and more consistently, and they don't get tired of doing it -Machines don't do no-call-no-shows or show up late to work There's likely a plethora of other things, but those happened to pop into my head first. Now you look at that and think, "Wow, manufacturers must've saved a lot of money after using machine run production lines." And now that these machines have factories that can produce them efficiently, the cost of the machine has gone down signficantly. Think about it, we're not just talking about hourly wage. Especially in the modern day with modern health insurance laws and modern compensation laws. Think of risks that a human undergoes by working somewhere and the workman's compensation a company has to pay out due to the simple fact that humans are vulnerable. A lot more cost goes into this than a simple minimum wage, and these jobs don't pay minimum wage, because they are dangerous. 2) Modern technology can do much more than put a car together. a. For those of you who work at a fast food joint, you could potentially be thinking there's no way that a robot would ever come after your job. McDonald's nickname is "job security" because their requirment is that you're not actively doing drugs (during the interview) and that you have a heartbeat. So if everything else fails, they're probably hiring, and you're probably going to get a job there if you apply for at least minimum wage pay. But what if a robot could make a burger more efficiently and more correctly than you? Refer to video 2. http://www.youtube.com... That's right, this burger making robot makes burgers with precision and almost as fast as your average joe. Humans can still go faster, but this robot was a prototpye, and it doesn't make mistakes. Humans make mistakes all the time. If you've ever gone out to eat, you know this. So anyway, let's look at the benefits this robot brings, because I've really only focused on a couple. I'll be the GM at a Steak n' Shake here for a minute, and the corporation is telling me they'll add a robot to my burger line if I can prove that the benefits outweigh the costs. I tell him that there's only a couple burger making guys worth keeping around, but they have a couple problems. They make burgers very fast, but sometimes their speed just causes them to mess up orders or get things mixed up during a rush. This results in about 15% spoilage during our money making hours. They also like to snack on the bacon and french fried onions, and they're some hungry hippos. So we can add another very generous 10% in product loss. Aside from that, I usually catch them texting or joking around when they could be working on something else to help the restaurant. So far they're making me enough money to justify paying them minimum wage, but I can't schedule them full time without having to offer insurance, and now they're in this union demanding $15 an hour. If I look at the numbers again, I don't know how I can keep even my best employees employed if they keep behaving like this. So the corproation says, "Sounds like you need a machine to take over your assembly line," and that job becomes obsolete, because this robot is open 24/7, doesn't take breaks, and it doesn't get tired of doing things at a constant speed. It may just be a Steak n' Shake, but as long as you justify the cost, then you can replace humans with robots. In fact, if you look at video 3, you'll see a few prototype robots doing more than just preparing a burger. http://www.youtube.com... b. Here's a real world example of a coffee shop that doesn't use humans. http://www.youtube.com... Refer to video 4. This robot does all the work there. The humans just own the shop, throw out the garbage, and perform cleaning and maintenance. Whereas a small coffee shop may have employeed 12 people to do all this work, the owners can do it by themselves without having to employee anyone else. Then if 100 coffee shops of the same size did this, that's 1,200 people unemployed. That's generous though. Bump it up to 1,000, and that's 12,000 people unemployed, and that's just coffee shops. c. Customer service is safe right? Not quite. USAA has adopted an AI customer service assistant that makes the customer service jobs much easier [2]. In some cases the AI, Nina, can help a customer from start to finish without ever having to connect you to a human customer service representative [3]. And it doesn't need you to type in numbers other than to verify your identity with a PIN. It hears you say "yes" and "no" and more complex phrases like "I would like to submit a travel notification" and it either helps you itself or transfers you to a human who can help you. Now, beyond the things that something like the Amazon Echo can do, we have the development of lifelike robots that can interact with humans and learn how to act more like humans. See video 5. http://www.youtube.com... Of course, that's probably incredibly expensive right now (although Sophia is not currently for sale), but if you were to create a manufacturing plant that just 3D printed the skeletons, put in the hardware, installed the software, then covered it in skin-colored silicone, then this could be significantly cheaper, and it could be significantly more useful to a company than the standard human employee. Refer to the list of expenses I talked about above. An employee can cost 1.25 to 1.4 times their base salar range [4]. This means an employee who earns 50,000 a year may cost the company 62,000 to 70,000 a year. That's before we consider things like employee theft, sexual harrassment, and employee disputes. Now, imagine paying $50,000 for a robot and spending only $500 in maintenance costs. That's a lot more attractive from a business standpoint. 3) New technology will cause an increase in unemployment: People who run businesses are known for doing one thing very well: making money. If something makes "business sense" then they will do it to increase profits. Using new machinery makes business sense. Technology only has to do two things to beat humans: be cheaper and do it better. A heart surgeon may make 3 mistakes a month, but a robotic heart surgeon may only make 1 every three months. In that case, the robotic heart surgeon is the one you'd want working on you. A self-driving car may be the cause of one accident in a year, but what about humans? I don't think I need to provide a statistic to prove that humans are worse than that. Brilliant minds are hard at work making robots that can do anything better than a human can. While I don't think that robots will take literally every job (because we're not that stupid), I think that we can expect a signficant spike in unemployment in developed countries (particularly the US, the UK, Japan, etc). Thank you for your time! I look forward to seeing TUF's response! Sources: [1] https://www.theatlantic.com... [2] http://findbiometrics.com... [3] Personal experience [4] http://web.mit.edu...