Question

Historically, the introduction of technology has caused profound changes in the labor market and, temporarily at least, displaced people from jobs. Discuss whether the introduction of extensive process automation is likely to have the same consequences for software engineers. If you don’t think it will, explain why not. If you think that it will reduce job opportunities, is it ethical for the engineers affected to passively or actively resist the introduction of this technology?

Answer 1

Technological advancement and the need for humanity to obtain faster and more efficient processes in all social sectors has caused a strong automation of several jobs that were previously done manually, by workers. The automation of these services, allows a faster, but efficient, more standardized and more economical production. This has hindered the entry of workers into the productive sector, causing major layoffs, competitions and wage cuts. Agricultural countries, such as Brazil, for example, even replace about 300 workers, with only one harvester machine, controlled by software and only one driver. This scenario is worrying for workers, but this only tends to grow and become more and more common in our society.

However, this substitution of human labor for automation is a reality for manual and manual labor, which is not the case for software engineering. Software engineering works with the creation, monitoring, specification and development of software (which are used in automation, including). These processes need to be carried out by human hands, which shows that automation will not negatively affect software engineers, at least at the moment we live in today.