Who Are Better Workers, Machines or People?

In our article "The Job Chase," Jeremy Pollard talks about technology issues the American manufacturing industry faced during 2003. These issues included manufacturing jobs being outsourced to China and India. Today, we continue to face outsourcing job issues, and though there is a big push from our government to bring back manufacturing jobs to American soil, the industry worker now worries about different job displacement issues.

Pollard quote Bill Joy’s Wired magazine article, “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us.” In this article, Joy said that in our future, our insatiable appetite for improvement and productivity would be the culprit for the American manufacturing work force to be out of a job. Machines would be more productive and efficient at performing human jobs that people would become obsolete.

Was Joy right with his prediction? Are machines better workers? Has technology replaced people in manufacturing industry? Do you think that in this tough, economic period people will take their jobs back from the machines?