For centuries, people have fantasized that someday machines could have intelligence like mankind and work as faithful servants. Today this dream has come true in many fields thanks to rapid development in artificial intelligence research. Wonderful as this seems, machines have problems.
To begin with, people lose jobs when machines take their places, especially in the mass production industry such as automobile business. In factories of the famous car company Ford, almost every step of car making is done by giant robots that work faster with higher reliability and precision than human labor. Because of the adoption of robots, thousands of workers are put out of their old jobs and forced to make changes in their work. Even such changes create job opportunities because robots need people to take care of and operate, the number of new jobs is much smaller than that of lost, thus causing huge pressure on the labor market and government.
People become less smart because of the wide use of machines in their life. Nowadays people need to use their brain less than they did in the past. Everything is programmed and the only thing we need to do is to push a button or throw on a switch. This has given us great convenience but made us lazier and less smart. Everyone has the awkward moment troubling with the spelling of a simple word when writing with a pen. But with a computer, it will automatically proofread the spelling and grammar of your writing. So people become less concerned with learning things right. This is not a progress but a regress of our intelligence and culture.
But machines have many benefits that nobody can deny such as great work efficiency and low cost of mass production. The workload that could take months to finish by manual labor could be done flawlessly by robots in minutes. We have more purchasing power to enjoy a wider variety of goods and services because of the reduction of production costs with factories using machines. Other benefits include that machines could do dangerous jobs for people in high risk businesses like mining and construction.
To conclude, machines have many merits that make our life easier and more convenient, but they have caused many problems such as undercutting our job opportunities and overdependence on machines.
