Category: DTC 476

In a world where technology is important and more of our lives are being integrated with technology. A common concern seems to be that our generation seems to become more reliant on technology. But the most important question we must ask ourselves is, “Is this a good or bad thing that technology is taking over, will it affect our possible outcomes towards our future jobs?”. While it seems to be the most controversial topic of our privacy being unprotected, we must also consider how this technology may aid us in the future or hurt us in the end. I’m interested in both sides of this topic, especially from how often the news seems to debate over the possibility of us loosing jobs.

According to a Forbes article ” Technology has already taken over 90% of the jobs humans used to have.”(Luck). In fact, NASA used to employ human computers to calculate flight trajectories that helped get our spaceships into the sky. Today the aggregate computing power of human computing from that era is dwarfed by the device sitting in your pocket. However, NASA isn’t the only ones slowly replacing out human workers with machinery, in fact most grocery stores cut down on employees with the use of self-checkouts instead of hiring more cashiers. The same goes with a few fast food chains such as McDonald’s where there are also self-checkout like machines where costumers can order their own meal with minimal interaction with the workers at the front. While most people argue that technology is taking over our jobs, it is only replacing at most a quarter of human employees jobs. Most of the technology used by AI systems still need to be programmed by people. So although these robots may be taking over jobs, we’re also creating jobs by providing more technology. More innovated ideas to help others around us, as well as there are just some jobs that are too complex to be done by machinery in our present time. Boston Dynamics is famous for their many prototypes of their Spot, a dog like robotic that is built to not be kicked down and to carry things on all types of different terrains. Point being is, although everything seems like technology is taking over everything, we still have a long time before it could get to that.

Technology is expanding and so is it’s marketed demand for jobs.  Personally, the most common problem I could think of was the job scare in 2008, where many people where getting fired due to the economy. I think most people have the same fear as we start relying more and more on technology. They’re scared that many of the common jobs we have are getting taken away due to the creation of robotics and basic technology. While there are so many different articles that argue either technology is helping or we will end up being more of a dystopian society. Like many of the popular Sci-fi movies that show a broken society. A great popular Disney movie Wall-E displays this fear that common people have when it comes to our future. In Wall-E, we see an example of humans being too reliant on technology and eventually they come against technology and start over . However, there’s also argument that plenty of technology that aid human’s for the better, plenty of artificial intelligence items that are built to help people with disabilities. “Voice assistance, self-driving cars…” (Wiggers) items like this can help people who might have had difficulty or might not have been able to travel to the places they wanted originally.

While I’m interested in how technology can destroy or create new job industries in the market. This can also boost our economical state, with more inventions and technological creations we’ll have more use for the different uses and aid for humans. It’s beneficial to create a more inclusive environment in the future for everyone to be existing in. With the invention of self-driving cars more people can be on the road and explore different parts of new places that maybe they weren’t able to reach beforehand. I think it’s also possible for there to be some concern. Mainly because self driving cars also have a bad wrap for the possibility of being hacked. The first kind of self driving cars had this exact issue. However, most of this can be changed, with prototyping and testing often. Fast food chains and supermarkets have already created self checkout stations where there’s minimal interaction with cashiers, as mentioned before. But, also there’s medical fields that are using technology to create surgical robots, like VR assisting eye training surgeons. (Loftus). I believe it’ll be less apocalyptic once more technology comes out, we’re most likely to see technology and humans working along side with each other. Even then most of the technology created has to be done by engineers and other programmers to begin with. Therefore, we’ll see less of these fears play out.

As mentioned before technology improves communications, and knowledge. We’re seeing an increase in STEM majors (Peller), majors in these fields have skyrocketed the past few years, and continues to grow. So even though technologies are taking a quarter of our work, it’s also creating new work for our generation of undergraduate and graduates in these STEM fields. With the increase of technology we have more uses for wearable technology as well, new smartphones link up to smartwatches, with that more possibilities open up for creators and inventors as well.

Having different implementations of communications, also connecting all of us together through the medium of the internet. While Bolter and Grusin’s article suggest that new media and old media influences how we understand each other. We can see how that is really true, although the evolutions of phones would be an example. We slowly transitions through direct messaging throughout our social media apps. Originally back in the day, we had the transferring of messages or letters through mail. The mail would be carried on horseback and take a long time for messages to be received from on another. Eventually we moved on to our mail transferring through mail trucks, overseas, or through planes. While now we see direct messaging or texting mimicking the same concepts but even faster. Messages are quickly received to one another, without having to wait a long time. Participants in chatting won’t have to wait for the weather to be better to receive their messages.  And much like letters we have ways of emailing which is just quite literally electric mail. So we can see how the evolution of mail has evolved through the use of technology and how it mimics in the same way. Although these are less technologically based and more physical, these apps for us to talk to each other wouldn’t be possible without technology and the people behind it.

Although knowledge is commonly known to be at our fingertip it also empowers us with information, though us as consumers must understand that there are fake news and real news. We need to understand how to differentiate between the two. But technology also allows us to be closer and connected because of communication.  Though there are so many statistical analysis about what may happen when technology takes over, we’ll never know until it happens. So we must just be cautious of our understanding of technology. The more people who understand technology and basic coding, the less people will assume that ALL jobs will be taken over.

 

Resources:

Luck, Gleen. “Technology Has Already Taken Over 90% Of The Jobs Humans Used To Do.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 18 Jan. 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/01/18/technology-has-already-taken-over-90-of-the-jobs-humans-used-to-do/#3bd0f2201bdd.

O’Brien, Matt. “Will Robots Take Your Job? Quarter of US Workers at Risk.” ABC News, ABC News Network, 2019, abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/chefs-truck-drivers-beware-ai-coming-jobs-60586948.

Service, Indo-Asian News. “Can Artificial Intelligence Take Away Your Job? Probably Not.” India Today, India Today, 19 Feb. 2019, www.indiatoday.in/education-today/news/story/can-artificial-intelligence-take-away-your-job-probably-not-1459601-2019-02-19.

https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot

Wiggers, Kyle. “Here Are the Ways AI Is Helping to Improve Accessibility.” VentureBeat, VentureBeat, 29 Oct. 2018, venturebeat.com/2018/05/17/here-are-the-ways-ai-is-helping-to-improve-accessibility/.

Loftus, Tom. “The Morning Download: Genentech’s VR Effort Focuses on Training Eye Surgeons.” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 7 Feb. 2019, blogs.wsj.com/cio/2019/02/07/the-morning-download-genentechs-vr-effort-focuses-on-training-eye-surgeons/.

Peller, Lauren, et al. “Officials Continue to Push Science Agenda as STEM Majors Soar.” The GW Hatchet, Https://Www.gwhatchet.com, 4 Mar. 2019, www.gwhatchet.com/2019/03/04/officials-continue-to-push-science-agenda-as-stem-majors-soar/.

Understanding Technology: Where does it come from, where does it go?

As we evolve in our digital age, more often than not, we start to question: is it all worth it? Our dependency on technology becomes more evident throughout the generations. As more children start to understand how to work technology at just the age of three, it can be terrifying to imagine what our future may hold. However, understanding where all this data collected from our technological devices is just as important as understanding how it works and functions.

“No single term-such as “literacy” -can support the weight of the shifting, contingent activities we have been describing. ” Anne Frances Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola in their article mentions how digital literacy is a broad spectrum. In fact, they go into how literacy is just a big umbrella term, we see literacy attached behind every term we know whether it is digital, technological, or computer literacy. Though literacy is often associated with books instead and we often times don’t link the two together as one component. They bring up the point that now we are changing to having to understand not just physical books, but literacy can be seen in other ways and forms as well.

Questioning what is defined as literacy, while it’s easy for us to realize that this is happening we also need to question the reality of it. Ideas such as how should literacy in the technological world should be built? If it should be based on “decision-making powers” because it is up to us on how we use our information. Whether or not everyone should understand technology in it’s entirety or just know technology in it’s base-level surface. We as the consumers must first understand what our own relationship with technology should be. Meanwhile, There is an effort to link technology and literacy together. But, is it the right approach to doing so, always seems to be the debate across all platforms. Each time digital literacy is mentioned there’s also the question of whether or not the idea of linking the understanding of technology is safe for consumers.

Many of these assumptions and fears of technology can be linked towards Metadata, “Metadata is the central to how [maps, signs, dashboards, web searches, etc.] operate… for most of us, it would be undesirable to have access to the full complexity of a banking system or telephone network”. From this quote, we understand that there is a middle ground between the information of Metadata and how it’s presented to the user. As users we don’t need to have access to the entire library of metadata, rather we need to understand what is used with a simple UI (User Interface). While most users wouldn’t understand the behind the scenes of all the information we witness and use. “…we barely understand anything about [a series of complex technological systems]… neither how they work, nor where they come from, nor why they take the forms the do.”(Radical Technology) Like before in the quotation for Metadata it’s easy to see how most users don’t really have access to the understanding of how most technology or networking systems. It seems that we as users are often just taking technology for granted and just understanding how to operate them on the front end level. Unless people really understand the other ways of technology we just function without questioning how everything works. While some people may take interest to working with metadata, such as coders and other people alike. We really need to understand how our information is being used or we’ll never really know.

As a user of technology myself, I didn’t even think to question the middle ground of literacy. And even in our generation I think it’s important to question how everything works and functions. Especially where our data is going and when it’s being used. All readings lead to the question to: “Would we see more understanding in the complex middle ground of digital literacy more in the future to protect ourselves?”. Surely understanding the transportation in between would create more of an awareness to what goes on in between not just understanding the beginnings and where our information ends up. The common theme between all the readings is that we just don’t have enough information to know as the general public unless we know how everything truly works on it. We are just oblivious unless we put more research into it, whether this is through learning at school or just from self-taught research.

Proficiency in understanding metadata is important and to know what companies do to our privacy online is just as important as anything else. The best examples of these are social media and the world wide web itself. Many may not know but our data is best collected when it comes to social media. The most famous company that partakes in this would easily be Facebook and Instagram since now they are joint companies. Facebook had plenty of allegations of misuse in users information, in fact, now users are able to download their own Facebook information. This download includes what companies are interested in you and what your interest spark in similar companies or music bands. The misuse of our own personal data to also skew our political views making politics more messy than it already is.

To connect these ideas to the past of how I learned digital technology would be coding. Coding is a great example of digital literacy, because it is no longer surprising for girls to understand coding. Before when my parents were growing up, it wasn’t often that women would be working in the computer industry. Much of coding also works with plenty of metadata, and with the internet at our hands, there are plenty of it. With our generation growing up simple coding is already available for us to use and understand. There are a vast amount of tutorials on the internet as well as video tutorials through Youtube. STEAM majors are starting to become more common among, not just young  boys but also girls. We see an extension of summer camps that teach you basic coding needs, whether it’s coding a simple game, or robotics. When I started learning how to code it was around when I was 12, I started off editing HTML/CSS, when Tumblr was popular and editing my own blog page. From there in high school I learned the different types of languages, starting off with Javascript. My knowledge towards coding slowly expanded over the years and now I am proficient in HTML, Javascript, C and C++. As it continues to grow, I can also watch my brother who is 7 years younger than me grow in coding as well. When he was 6 he already knew how to program basic robotics making a robot go up or down.

So in theory, understanding digital literacy, our own metadata and how technology works is definitely needed. We find problems with targeted ads towards people because of how our data is leaked to companies. The more people are aware of these, the more companies would need to cater to all the need of a consumer. There needs to be a balance in understanding the back-end of everything as well as the front-end.