D V L S Pranathi, January 3, 2023
We would’ve heard many people say that robots will soon take over the world as an exaggeration. However, it is not a joke anymore. People usually are under the presumption that robots are reducing the need for human labor, especially when we consider examples like chatbots on amazon or other shopping platforms where these chatbots provide a much more efficient form of customer service by handling tracking packages without any human involvement. People cannot be blamed for having this chain of thought, especially when robots like Sophia, a humanoid robot, are hyped so much across the world.
A study by Eric Dahlin, a sociology professor at Bringham Young University, has proven that there is no need to have a fear of robot intervention. The study has revealed that the rate at which robots are replacing humans is lower than it seems to the human eye and that people are overestimating the extent to which robots are overtaking the workforce.
A recent study published in the journal Socius: Sociological Research for a dynamic world revealed that only 14% of the workforce jobs had been replaced by robots which is barely anything. However, just as the human mind works, people who have experienced a loss of employment due to a robot have managed to exaggerate the entire idea by three times.
Dahlin surveyed close to 2,000 people regarding their opinions of work replacement by robots to better understand the relationship between job loss and bots. 47% of all jobs, according to those who have been replaced by a robot (about 14%), have been taken over. In a similar vein, people who had not personally experienced job displacement nonetheless believed that robots had replaced 29% of jobs.
He also concluded from his research that this fear among humans could be dated back to the early 1800s. He says that the results have stayed consistent throughout all the studies and that robots are not displacing workers. All companies worldwide are trying to integrate robots and the human workforce for a greater and better outcome.
“An everyday example is an autonomous, self-propelled machine roaming the isles and cleaning floors at your local grocery store,” says Dahlin. “This robot cleans the floors while employees clean under shelves or other difficult-to-reach places.” (source SciTech daily)
Another excellent example of this idea, as stated by Dahlin, is the aviation industry in which humans and robots work together. They use robots to paint the wings of airplanes. A robot can complete one coat of paint in 24 minutes, while the same thing would take a few hours if done by a human. Therefore, humans load and unload the paint while the robots paint. Hence, we can conclude that robots are overtaking taking the world but not at the rate exaggerated by us humans, and it is in our hands to decide if this is a boon or a bane.
