Thomas McCormack Essays - Indian Religions, Automation, Buddhism

Thomas McCormack Professor Sharon LaRue ATA 134-801 9 December 2017 Automation in the Workplace: The Future of Economics, Culture and Morality The idea that robots or machines will one day break free from their mechanical shackles to rise up and enslave the human race; the very source of their existence, is by no means a cutting-edge discussion. In fact, even as far back as Ancient Greece, myths such as the golden robots of Hephaestus began to appear, and many ancient civilizations featured realistic humanoid automatons that the faithful believed imbued within these statues, were very real minds, capable of wisdom and emotion. (McCorduck, 2004) Now, the topics discussed in the New York Times article: "The Robots Are Coming for Wall Street" by Nathaniel Popper may seem like a far cry from popular science fiction like 2001: A Space Odyssey, but in reality this could just be the beginning. The article follows Daniel Nadler, CEO of a relatively new company called Kensho. Kensho, a Japanese Zen term which means: To see nature', is a data analytics and machine intelligence company, with the company's vision direct from their own website being: "we believe that our civilization's newest technology --machine intelligence--can and should be used to better understand our oldest human systems." Nadler predicts that between a third and a half of employees in the finance industry during the next decade will lose their jobs due to emerging automation software like Kensho, and it's not exclusive to the lower-paid, less skillful positions that one may expect. Automation, in the finance industry, has now moved on to research and analysis, as software like Kensho has become increasingly more sophisticated and capable of dissecting enormous data sets faster and more reliably than humans. Software written by the company Kensho, can automatically predict how markets will move in response to different world events, such as the escalation in the Syrian Civil War for example. It can generate a report that "would have taken days, probably 40 man-hours, from people who were making an average of $350,000 to $500,000 a year", Nadler told the Times. The New York Times article also references an Oxford study from 2013 called: "The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerization?" In this piece, different jobs were assessed as to how susceptible they would be to computerization. Based on their estimates of future expected impacts of computerization in the workplace, they predict that about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk (Frey and Osborne, 2013) The emergence of companies like Kensho further support the findings that were discussed in this somewhat controversial study from 2013. Some may argue that the impact of computerization on labor market outcomes is well established in the literature, which documents the decline of employment in routine intensive occupations (Frey, 2013) is something to be weary over as it will potentially increase unemployment levels. While cutting out a large percentage of the jobs that exist today may seem like a severely negative impact on the surface, automation of many of these occupations could prove to actually be more beneficial to the future of the work force. If we were to make an ethical decision based on the utilitarian rule, and pursue an outcome that produces the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people (George, Jones, 2016, p. 91), it would behoove oneself to examine some of the potential benefits of automation and computerization in not only the financial marketplace but many other workplaces. Product quality and output could be expected to rise; a benefit of automation and computerization is freedom f rom fatigue. With either robots or programs, companies produce the same product the same way, with virtually no variation. Freeing up human input from mundane repetitive tasks can also help free up employees to focus on the jobs that require critical thinking rather than busy work to name just one other benefit. Many man hours would be saved through automation of menial tasks that don't require much effort from employees. Through algorithm inputs and other data sets, companies can implement programmed decisions that have been made so many times in past that managers have developed rules or guidelines around them (George, Jones, 2016, p. 164), allowing employees to