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On Technology, Choices, and Human Labor Economics

 

            Ever since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has been concerned with their security in the labor market as machines pervaded throughout the economy. Similar fears carried over during the beginnings of the modern technological age, as the advent of the computer quickly transformed the face of industry across the world. Because these machines had a reputation for outperforming humans with respect to calculations, memory capacity, and processing efficiency "to name just a few "different views of technology were placed in the popular spotlight. The anti-technology view, as espoused by Hannah Arendt in her work, The Human Condition, propagated that technology will constrain certain facets of society and will eventually destroy the market for labor as firms would employ more machines in place of humans. This view, however, assumes that the intent of technology is to replace humans "an obvious oversimplification. Though this view is important to consider when examining the role that technology plays in society, much evidence consistently reinforces the notion that the intent of technology is to actually enhance human productivity, which in turn, has a greater social benefit than the aforementioned alternative. .
             Proponents of the anti-technological standpoint, such as Arendt, often times make the argument that humanity institutes technology as a means of "liberation- from labor (Arendt 4). Arendt writes: .
             This [threatening event] is the advent of automation, which in a few decades will empty the factories and liberate mankind from its oldest and most natural burden, the burden of laboring and bondage to necessity What we are confronted with is a prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. (4-5).
             In other words, she contends that this desire to facilitate labor will eventually reach a point where humans are no longer needed to do any work "binding society to inevitable unemployment.


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