Robotic Assimilation

incurred on their previous employees. [Ford, 2015] The integration of robots into the human workforce will clearly put millions people out of work, but to what extent will it affect the economy and society in general? There is a principle of computer capabilities called Moore's Law, which states that computer power doubles roughly every two years. This means that every two years new computers have double their previous processing power, and computer technology is therefore advancing at an exponential rate. Robotics is currently following a similar trend, which will lead to extensive innovations in the field over the next decade [Ford, 2015]. As robots become more humanoid in appearance, functionality, and thought, many people fear the attempted

The United States is a capitalist country, which means the major corporations that run the country will seek any method to maximize their own profits. As demonstrated by the fast-food discussion above, this will likely lead to levels of unemployment unheard of since the Great Depression. Approximately half of the total jobs in the United States will no longer be require human labor [Ford, 2015]. But what will happen to the millions of people seeking employment and unable to find any? When wages drop and unemployment soars, the economy plummets because average citizens simply cannot purchase common items that they were previously accustomed to. Instead of spending what little money they possess, they will save cash and eliminate extraneous costs wherever possible, which just leads to economic stagnation. [Worrall, 2015] If this situation becomes dire enough, then there are only three logical outcomes. Firstly, corporations could greedily incorporate robotic workers into their

Will robots simply be the slaves of mankind or eventually achieve equality with humans as they grow smarter, and how will we govern interactions between our two kinds? This will be determined by humanity's ethical values and to what extent these will be attribute to robots. Mankind has certainly abolished unethical practices before and can do so again. For instance, in order to fuel the Southern economy of the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, over 11 million people from Africa were capture, enslaved, and shipped off from their homeland to work on plantations [Mintz, 2015]. Africans were treated as sub-human and often faced brutal punishments by their masters. Families were torn apart and disobedient slaves were whipped and beaten. Such behavior was considered perfectly acceptable behavior of the time as slaves were merely seen as the property of those who owned them. It wasn't until the Civil War era of the late nineteenth century that Africans-Americans began to gain some rights, beginning with the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery in the United States. [Civil War, 2014] By today's standards, human enslavement is clearly immoral, but people of the time had a more diverse opinion on the matter. So why did the general public begin to change their minds? The reasoning behind this shift lies in the concept of human