Assignment 1: Why People Resist New Technology

One of the reasons people resist new technology may be people’s fear of losing their job. With reference to the past, one can see that during the Industrial Revolution, the number of people employed in both primary and secondary industries was greatly reduced when technology was introduced. In that period of time, with the development of technology, many machines were invented. As a result, the jobs of hundreds and thousands of people were replaced by machines. Looking at the sector of agriculture in the primary industry, threshers were invented to replace people in the job of wheat harvesting. As for the secondary industry, in the sector of manufacturing, sewing machines were introduced into the clothing industry and the number of seamstresses required was reduced. All these substitutions of labourers with machines were due to the higher job efficiency and consistency delivered by the machines. This rate of substitution exists even today. In the competitive world that we are living in now, job efficiency is of even higher importance. This causes a higher focus on research and development. Hence, there will be more introductions of new machines, posing an ever growing threat to people’s jobs. For example, in Kodak, a filmmaking company, a machine for mixing of filmmaking ingredients replaced the jobs of 14 workers (Hagenbaugh, 2002, para. 23). In addition, these machines are connected to controls rooms where only a few workers are needed there to watch computer screens (Hagenbaugh, 2002, para. 24). Therefore, one of the potential reasons for people to resist new technology is the fear of being made obsolete.

Reference

Hagenbaugh, B. (2002, December 13). U.S. manufacturing jobs fading away fast. September 12, 2008, from http://www.usatoday.com/money/jobcenter/workplace/2002-12-13-factory-jobs_x.htm