When five telivision studios entered an antitrust lawsuit against CBS in 1978, it cost over $2.2 million dollars for the studios to examine six million documents, with much of the money going to paying lawyers who worked for months at high hourly rates. However, there are new advances in artificial intelligence software that can analyze documents much faster than lawyers for only a fraction of the cost. In January, Blackstone Discovery, an artificial intelligence software, helped analyze 1.5 million document for less than $100,000. These programs can extract relative concepts instead of just finding relavent terms in documents. This is also an advancement in that lawyers will get bored after reading too many documents, but computers won't. Software is also making its way into other jobs that may have required human services in the past, like loans, mortgages, and taxes. David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that new jobs are coming at the bottom of the economic period, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation. There is no doubt to Autor that new technology is a cause of unemployment.
I feel like a lot of today's society is too automated and technology-run. Many jobs that people used to do are being replaced by machines, and this is a major problem in causing downturns in the economy. Although machines are more efficient and cheaper, I think there should be a limit in how much machines should do in human society. What do you guys think? Should we continue having machines do tasks that humans used to do? Is it positive or negative to have machines do these tasks?
Saturday, March 5, 2011
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Machines are more accurate than humans in many ways. This case is no exception. Yes, people are losing jobs. But do we want to risk inaccurate findings by people who work continuously and begin to make mistakes. I agree with Tony however, this is troublesome. I mean, the goal of technology is to improve our lifestyle and make things simpler. Ironically, our advancements are making problems more complex on many fronts. We create technology to help us with our jobs but we end up losing them. Yes, technology makes things more convenient, but at the same time, we are making things less convenient because people such as these lawyers may find difficulties in finding other jobs. This brings us to that incessant debate over the future of technology when it is beginning to merge at an almost exponential rate with the future of the human race. Before we know it, we could in fact reach that "singularity" that many futurists and scientists have referred to in 2040. Scary, because this could occur when we are in our late 30's!
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