robots_plaintext.txt

In 1915, the horse population in the US reached its peak. Since then, the Humane Society reports that the number of horses in the US has dwindled, reaching all time lows. Ultimately, the rapid decline in horses is a direct result of the automobile industry. As a lower cost, more efficient, and easier to use technology became available to the masses, we eagerly discarded the beast of burden which carried us into the 20th century. Automobiles marked the end of useful horses in the same way that robots mark the end of useful humans. Robots are lower cost and more efficient than humans. They are also rapidly becoming more easy to use and more capable. Mechanical minds are smarter, faster, and better than their human equivalents. Ultimately, the rise of robots poses a threat to humankind. We are no longer at the top of the food chain. Let’s start off with the most obvious, yet distant threat of the rise of robots: warfare. Often thought to be a series of bloody battles involving guns and ammunition, the landscape of war has changed significantly with the rise of technology. Newer, fancier guns aid in the process of killing. Drones deploy missiles capable of taking out a city blocks full of people. Now, a new threat has arisen. Cyber warfare, using computers as a weapon of war, threatens our lives in the present day. Groups such as Anonymous, the Israeli Elite Force, or the government-backed hacker groups of China and North Korea pose a threat to other governments around the world. TIME Magazine even ranks China as the most serious of all cyber threats to the United States. All of these groups use artificial intelligence to accomplish acts of terror. My opponent may state that robots are not dangerous in the world of war, but that point of view is shortsighted and false. Robots are used for war in the modern day, and will continue to be used in the coming future. However, robots do not have to directly harm humans. It is much more easy for humans to harm themselves. Take, for example, the airline industry. Every day, thousands of people get on board big metal tubes and travel at almost the speed of sound 5 miles above the ground for hours at a time. Instead of a human controlling this vehicle, however, a large portion of the job is left up to the plane’s autopilot. Today, many pilots are dependent on this mechanical mind. This dependency is so widespread that it causes major problems when the autopilot is not available. Disasters such as Air France Flight 447 are thought to have been caused by these problems, according to The Telegraph. Another, similar threat exists in the stock market. As computers have advanced, investors have used their massive computational power to make a living. Today, the NYSE consists almost entirely of robots trading with other robots, a fact revealed by CBS’s 60 Minutes. If these robots were to fail in some way, economies of the world would be at stake. People’s dependence on computers has gotten out of hand, and it poses a threat to both human life and society as we know it. Finally, the most significant impact of robots on humans will be in the job market. Robots are designed to make life easier for humans. They already build our cars, phones, and much more. By doing this, robots are taking job opportunities away from the currently unemployed. Some people counter this argument with, “We don’t want people working those jobs anyway,” but that counter is fatally flawed. To examine the true extent of robots’ effect on the economy, we must look into the future. With the rise of self-driving cars comes the fall of the transportation industry. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the transportation industry in the US employs almost 10 million people. Mechanical minds would replace those people, leaving many families without a stable source of income. If countless families are forced to struggle as part of innovation, what’s the point of innovating? And the problem is not limited to cars: robots are becoming capable of doing other jobs, some even white collar. We even use them today for jobs such as engineering simulations and software automation, but robots are also used by industries generally considered human. At some point, you’ve probably even read a news article written by a robot. The potential of artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing. These mechanical minds pose a huge threat to the economy of not just the US, but the world. As humans, we are accustomed to being the best. The rise of robots threatens that fact and transitively threatens our society. When you grow up, you probably want a stable job in a safe country, and the rise of robots threatens your future. Therefore, I urge you to join the ranks of Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk by voting that robots pose a threat to humanity. If we can’t stop the machines, at least we can say, “I told you so.”