Technology should replace human labor

In this round I’m going to defend against it to show why technology should replace human labor. But first I’d like to point out that Dpowell brought up many topics in the previous round, but he didn’t rebut the arguments I made in round 2. I therefore consider them dropped. Now on to the defenses! 1. The blue light of technological devices messes up our sleep Con brings forth the fact that the blue light from electronic devices is bad for your sleep. But have no fear, more technology is here! A few people made the program f. lux (1). This program adjusts colors in a way that greatly reduces the stimulating effects of blue light at night, solving the problem. Plus, it’s free so if you don’t have it yet, feel free to get it. 2. Technology is bad for education My opponent believes technology is bad for education for two reasons. First of all, 87% of teachers agree that digital technology is creating an easily distracted generation with short attention spans. Furthermore, 64% of the teachers believe that technology is even doing more harm than good. These are arguments based on authority. The problem with that is that the authorities can be biased. Because of that I question how legit con’s argumentation is. After all, adults complain a lot about the younger generation, which created a bias. This already happened in ancient times. More than 2400 years ago Socrates lived and made this quote: "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. ” (2) Even XKCD made a comic about the fact adults have always complained about the younger generation. (3) So I suspect teachers are busy complaining about the younger generation. Since the technology people use is the biggest difference between the current generation and the generation of the teachers, technology becomes the scapegoat of everything teachers dislike about the younger generation. Because of all of this I suspect teachers are too biased to objectively decide whether or not technology does or doesn’t aid students in their education. 3. Technology makes our brains worse Con brought fourth multiple points that show technology makes us worse at taking in information, memory and navigation. But before I start refuting this argument, allow me to cite a quote from Darwin, the man who started the evolution theory: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. ” (4) This doesn’t just apply to species, but also to companies and people. How many companies sell carriages which have to get pulled by horses? Not many. They were all replaced by companies which sell cars. How many people who don’t know how to use a computer have a job? Not many. So the parts of the brain that take in information, manage the memory and manage the navigation are only important if the tasks they do are still important in the modern world. In the modern world there’s a lot of information within your reach. Taking in information is no longer very important. Filtering the important information out and forgetting the rest is a more important skill. Memory is getting less and less important, because we can now store a lot of information in our phones. Why bother remembering if it’s easier to just write it down? Navigation is also getting less important. Why bother training your hippocampus if you’re never going to use it anyway? Just use the navigation on your phone. So people get less good at certain skills, but so what? Those skills are no longer very important anyway. Furthermore, if your brain uses less energy for some activities, it can use that energy to boost other parts of the brain which are used in the modern world. 4. Addiction Con talks about how the internet and video games can be addicted. But before I’ll address this, allow me to digress to heroin addiction. First things first, what causes heroin addiction? Heroin, right? There’s even research backing this up. A rat was put in a cage with two bottles. One was ordinary water and the other was water with heroin added to it. The rat kept drinking the drugged water until he died. So to keep the rat healthy we should keep drugs away from them. Sounds legit, right? It might surprise you, but it isn’t legit. More research about addiction was done by Bruce Alexander. He created a luxurious cage he called rat park. It had colored balls, tunnels, other rats, just everything a rat would want. It also had two water bottles. One willed with ordinary water and the other with drugged water. The rats rarely touched the drugged water at all. So, how is this possible? It turns out that rats want to get attached to something. Normally other rats, but when those aren’t available they start to get attached to drugs. So rats don’t use drugs, because drugs are addicting. They are using it, because there’s nothing else to get attached to. Now back to the internet and video game addictions. They aren’t addiction in and of themselves. They only become harmful when people aren’t able to get satisfaction from other sources, like bonds with other people. So con made a mistake in identifying what the cause of the addiction was. This argumentation was made possible by this video from In a Nutshell - Kurzgesagt. 5. Costs of robot According to con a robot costs $20,000 - $22,000 and he believes it’s easier to just hire a human to do the job. But let’s do some math. The median income of an American was $53,657 per year. (5) So if you can replace 1 American with 1 robot, it takes 22,000 / 53,657 = 0.41 year for the robot to earn itself back. But let’s be realistic. There are extra costs that are connected to the robot. Electricity, maintenance, etc. But there are also extra costs of a human worker. Coffee, a work place, the risk the worker gets sick, etc. But most important of all, the Americans who can get replaced the easiest by machines are also the people who earn little. So after taking everything into account it’s maybe more realistic to say that it takes about 1 year before a robot earns itself back. That’s still a pretty short time, so it seems like robots can be cheaper than people. 6. Inflation In a previous round con mentioned that he believes technology will create mass unemployment and with that high inflation. I already showed in the previous round an increase in unemployment is unlikely, because new jobs will get created and people get the idea to start working less. But I also struggle with con’s logic about how rising unemployment could possibly lead to rising inflation. Especially because the Phillips Curve (see below) shows that high unemployment tends to correlate with low inflation. (6) When unemployment rises, inflation is not a problem. 7. Viruses and cookies I don’t have many characters left, so consider this dropped. Conclusion Many topics came by during this debate, but it seems like most of the attention got focused on the disadvantages of technology. But let’s summarize the debate from my point of view. Arguments for using technology to replace human labor, which con dropped: - Technology beats people in many tasks. Example: self-driving cars that cause fewer accidents - Technology enables us to spend time on other tasks. Example: self-driving cars allow people to spend no time driving the car, so they can use the time for other activities - Using more technology helped us in the past. Through technology fewer people had to work in agriculture, so those people could add value in other ways Arguments against technology replacing human labor with refutations: - Technology makes us lazy, but this is compensated by the fact people get smarter - People will no longer learn certain skills, but those are replaced with new skills - Technology makes us specialized and depending on others. This is not a problem, because more welfare can get generated this way - Some technologies are destructive, but most aren’t - Technology pollutes the environment, but the technologies that pollute the environment are already here. Stopping the development won’t solve this - Technology causes conflicts between classes, but some conflicts are good - Technology makes sure some jobs are lost, but those are compensated, because new jobs are created and people can start working less - The blue light of technological devices messes up our sleep, but there is technology to solve this problem - Con believes technology is bad for education and he uses the statements of teachers to back it up. I however question if teachers are truly able to objectively determine if technology is bad for education - Technology makes our brains worse, but the parts that get less bad are rarely used anyway. The energy saved from this can get used to improve other areas of the brain - When saying people get addicted to technology, the cause of the problem is often misidentified - Robots earn themselves back pretty quickly - There’s no correlation that suggests high unemployment leads to high inflation - Technology can get used to create viruses and cookies The list of disadvantages is longer, but the arguments are of lesser quality. Furthermore, most of them were refuted while the arguments for technology weren’t. So vote pro! Sources: 1) . https://justgetflux.com... 2) . http://answers.google.com... 3) . http://xkcd.com... 4) . http://thinkexist.com... 5) . https://en.wikipedia.org... 6) . http://tinyurl.com...