Technology should replace human labor

In this round I’m going to argue that replacing people with technology is good and that it should be supported with three arguments. Argument 1: Technology beats people in many tasks The first reason people should be replaced with technology is because technology is often better at the task. Let me give four examples to sketch a better picture: 1. The self-driving car of Google can drive itself. This technology is better at driving cars than people are, because these cars get in way fewer accidents than the cars driven by people (1). 2. Computers can beat people in chess. After convincing victories in 2005 and 2006 it was proved that computers can beat the best chess players (2). 3. It turns out that computers are good at judging what personality people have. With 10 Facebook likes a computer can determine your personality better than a co-worker, with 70 likes it can beat a friend and with 250 likes it can beat a spouse(3). 4. The 3D printer is a new way of manufacturing. There are hundreds of applications, but one of them is that SpaceX uses the 3D printer to build rocket parts. The reason 3D printing is used is because it gives options traditional, labor intensive, manufacturing methods don’t give (4). So, technology beats people in many tasks. So why should we support technology? Because if something is better it brings many advantages with it. The self-driving car has the advantage that it causes way fewer accidents than people do, so fewer people get injured and fewer people die in traffic. Knowing what the personality of a job candidate is can help recruiters determining who the most suitable candidate is. This list can be made longer, but I think you get the point. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. There is an even bigger advantage. Argument 2: Technology enables us to spend time on other tasks Many technologies that are invented reduce the amount of work people have to do. Some even get rid of it completely. Allow me to explain this in more detail with two examples: The self-driving car enables people to do other tasks while in the car. Since many people spend a lot of time in the car, this is certainly a big time-saver. It also reduces the frustration people get when they get in a traffic jam. They no longer have to do the accelerating and braking themselves anymore. The 3D printer enables people to manufacture things themselves. The old, simplified, supply chain looked like this: Raw resources are harvested -> raw resources are transported to a factory -> the factory changes the raw materials in products -> the products are shipped to the customer -> the customer uses the product With the 3D printer the supply chain looks like this: Raw resources are harvested -> raw resources are transported to the customer -> the customer manufacturers the product himself with the 3D printer and uses it Notice how it’s now only required to transport the resources once. The manufacturing process is also simplified, so time is saved over there as well. So, time is saved. Why is this good? Because this allows people to get more done in the same amount of time. If it took 1000 hours to build a house in the past, but only 500 hours to build the same house in the present, why not spend 500 extra hours on improving the house? Adding an extra floor, central heating, air-conditioning or some solar panels. You now have time to improve your life, which in turn increases your utility a lot. These are my main two arguments, but to make my case even stronger, let’s look at what technology did in the past. Argument 3: Using more technology helped us in the past In the past the majority of the people worked in agriculture. But over time more and more people stopped working in agriculture and started working in other industries. This is shown in the graph below. (5) The percentage of people who works in agriculture dropped significantly, because productivity increased. More productivity means that fewer people can still produce all the food we need. So, why did the productivity go up? Technology. This includes using fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, but the storage facilities also improved which meant food could be stored for longer without spoiling. Furthermore, tools like digging ploughs, tractors, mechanical threshers and combine harvesters enabled people to do more work in less time(6). After technology made sure fewer people had to work in agriculture, more people could work in other industries, like education, research, recreation and transportation. In the present day only a small portion of your utility comes from food and a lot comes from. Another important historic invention was the printing press. Before the invention of the printing press every single book had to be written by hand. Not surprisingly, there weren’t very many books and only a few people could read. But after the printing press books became cheaper. Since books became cheaper, there were more books. More books meant that reading became more and more important. So more people decided to learn to read. This led to a more educated population (7). These examples show that in the past technologies had a huge positive impact on society. Extrapolating this trend and we come to the conclusion that future technologies will also have a huge positive impact on society. I will now hand the debate over to Dpowell so he can give his arguments. Sources: 1) . http://www.technologyreview.com... 2) . https://en.wikipedia.org... 3) . http://www.rdmag.com... 4) . http://www.spacex.com... 5) . http://ourworldindata.org... 6) . http://www.ons.gov.uk... 7) . https://www.psprint.com...