In my classmate’s Thomas Love’s blog, there is a post titled “The impact of Artificial Intelligence” very intriguing to me. Thomas expresses that artificial intelligence is replacing more and more jobs in labor markets, describes some general characteristics of replaceable jobs by automation, and both the economic and political impacts artificial intelligence has made in the society. In the end of the article, Thomas makes an appeal that to be equipped with the knowledge irreplaceable by automation is the utmost significance, especially for us current university students who are still studying on campus.

After reading this article, I can’t help thinking deeply about the analysis of such future trends. Mosty, I agree that artificial intelligence is definitely a warning for job seekers in the world, but this warning is a double sided sword with both the good and the bad.

On the one hand, if laborers do not improve their skills and their knowledge, they will be highly likely to lose their jobs and get replaced by robots. Thus, massive unemployment could happen as a result. When thousands of people would lose jobs and get homeless for such reason, this could even cause instability in the macroeconomy potentially.

On the other hand, such threats as automation in labor markets could not only improve the economic productivity but also propel everyone to improve and grow. According to the famous Darwinian law of natural selection, the species who cannot adapt to the environment will die out, but the ones who can successfully adapt to the system can survive and reproduce with more powerful genes to better adapt to the environment. Nowadays, although humans don’t have brutal competitions of survivals and getting food, we still need to constantly learn, improve, and grow in order to better adapt to the fast-changing economic environment as Thomas appeals in the end of his article. At least, this is the only way to ensure we will not get replaced by robots, and that we still have values brought to the society, which robots don’t have.

In general, governments could use the power of laws to force companies not to adopt robots and cut off workers too quickly in order to ease the unemployment caused by artificial intelligence; meanwhile, workers need to acquire the habits to constantly learn new knowledge and keep up the moving pace of the world. In this way, artificial intelligence would not only improve the economic productivity but also improve the labor quality all over the fields.

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