Replacing Humans with Machines: Threats and Opportunities

Abstract

Many aspects of life stemming from professional to personal have been extremely changed and impacted by technological advancements. Traditionally, the labor market depended on routine manual labor offered by human capital; however with the technological advancements in computerization, the market behavior for routine human labor has extremely changed. Companies and people have been on the verge of ever trying to economize the use of labor and maximizing the available space while finding new uses and sources of labor, argued Frey and Osborne (2013). Jobs have become very susceptible to computerization, in that over the past three decades, computers and computerized mechanics have substituted a considerable number of jobs including functions of telephone operators and bookkeepers among others. A strong pattern is recorded over the years where tasks that were routine and repetitive are increasingly being replaced and performed by automated machines. Computerized and automated machined pose an overwhelming threat to the repetitive and routine manual labor traditional performed by human labor. Therefore, this paper provided a literature review about the extent of routine human labor susceptibility to computerization and automated machines.