The development in robots and AI has been making some good progress and there is always a question surrounding the development in this field, which is how much threat it causes to human labours. There are some obvious advantage and disadvantages about using robots to replace human labours.
First, using robots can lower firms' costs of labours, but using robots has a cost of maintenance. Secondly, using robots can increase productivity and robots do not need any holiday or break; on the other hand, it does not mean robots cannot make mistake, robots can make mistakes due to technical issues, human errors and many other factors, once robots fail, it is very likely to have a systematic failure, which can be much more damaging to the firm. Thirdly, using AI or robots reduce the demand for labours, but the requirements for the skills of workers employed become much higher, and overall it may not reduce the overall cost of labours.
Therefore, especially at the starting period, robots should not affect human labours too much, since the cost reduction by using robots is not significant and attractive enough; moreover, even when the technology is more mature, the demand for highly skilled labours can increase and be paid better, because firms cannot bear systematic failure caused by "bad" designs of robots.
No comments:
Post a Comment