“Unless you’ve already lost your job to technology, there’s no need to sweat bullets — even then, your solution is easy. Focus on how you can embrace technology so you aren’t reliving eerie scenes from Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner where the distinctions between humans and robots are marginal...Master the art of communication – it’s one way that machines will never be able to compete.”
Akins, C. (n.d.). 5 Jobs Being Replaced by Robots. Retrieved January 29, 2015, from http://excelle.monster.com/benefits/articles/4983-5-jobs-being-replaced-by-robots?page=6
I agree with Crystal in that there is nothing to sweat; that all we have to do to avoid being replaced is to embrace our technological counterparts. That being said, I disagree with her in that distinctions between humans and robots being marginal would be a bad thing. I’m not talking about Bladerunner, which is a film I have never seen, rather I’m thinking of the future. A bionic human seems to me to be the next step in evolution. Humans are imperfect beings who forget, get sick, and have many other imperfections. With the assistance of technology, there is no reason why these imperfections can’t be fixed. Likewise, the thought that machines will never be able to compete in areas like communication is old fashioned. 20 years ago, people thought computers would never be able to reply one sentence, let alone several. That being said, if we look at systems like clverbot, we can see that, though it’s not exactly the best communicator, a machine can hold a conversation for a few moments. This small step towards artificial communication shows that the thoughts from 20 years ago and, more importantly, this article are wrong.