An Uncompetitive Competition between Us and Them
Is it possible for human beings to be completely unemployed due to the domination of automation? This is not only an intruding question, but also a starting-point from which we have commenced without our full consideration. This demonstrates to us that technology cannot only be dependent upon the purpose designed by its maker, but frankly there is hidden purpose where its maker did not see because it was implied within its progress.
I reckon that it is totally possible for human beings to be unemployed given the fact that there have been a large number of devices, tools, machines, and the like which take over human beings’ capability. Industrial revolution about three centuries ago had then shaped our being-in-the-world. We did not need human being’s power which could be overcome by machines. The unemployment era has been begun since the time.
Technology and science are by no means stagnant because both are the results of the deepest desire of human being to manifest human being’s curiosities during living in the world. Science executes many things so as to improve and enhance technologies. But, actually the two are working together, weaving each other, being complementary, because science itself can, and only can, move forward by the evolve of technologies.
Since one decade ago, we have arrived in internet era, on screen life which we are connected one another without our physical presence. It means that our movement to be able to meet a person physically has been ruptured by internet, which up to now has been our lifestyle. We become unemployed in physical reality on the grounds that internet has taken over one of the modes of our being.
Fundamentally, technologies we have made shape our being-in-the-world pertaining to our mode of existential meaning. Furthermore, it has also shaped the mode of our praxis. Nowadays, Tesla’s self-driving car indeed threatens a concrete profession, that is drivers. Absolutely, once self-driving car has been outspread worldwide, all drivers will become totally unemployed. Frankly, it has been happening to train drivers whose jobs have been annexed by electric locomotives.
The existence of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or we often recognise it as drone, is endangering the role of a pilot. It will be happening possibly one decade later because the company will consider the lacks of human being which can be overcome by the meticulous work of a computer program. A pilot will truly be unemployed, despite up to now it still being a desired profession. Contrary to our presupposition that technologies always help us, we encounter a big problem interrupting the history of human being, that the life of human being, in particular their professions, is being taken over by technology we ourselves have made.
In one hand, technology inevitably eases our burdens in the world, whereas in the other hand apparently our burdens which it has eased are exchanged with bigger burdens which directly menace our survival force. Nonetheless, it is still far because we can now still be enjoying our life without being concerned about the intruding impact of technology on human being’s survival.
As a matter of fact the domination of technology has been commenced not since two decades ago, precisely since ninetieth when Gary Kasparov, a grandmaster of chess in the world, was defeated by a pile of computer program, Deep Blue, in a tremendous match of chess. The chess game, as one of the best complicated games which before signed the triumph of human being’s intellectual, demonstrated that unluckily such a huge arrogance of human being was totally bullshit. We have conspicuously been subjugated, subordinated, and conquered by a bloody thing we ourselves have created. Are we surely in-between (un)competitive competitions?