Beyond Human Relations :Man And Machine

Man, since time immemorial and machines with the advent of technology have been constantly reshaping and transforming the work spaces. This is especially visible in factories and manufacturing workshops wherein maximum labour power is required. In India during the early days, many small cities had semi-developed airports. The luggage deboarded from the airplane used to be loaded in a cart, driven by a man and then dropped at the entrance from where one or more men would manually drag it inside i.e.manual labour.Nowadays, all airports have the facility of an automatic luggage transfer, known as the conveyor belt i.e. aMachine. In addition to the conveyor belts, there are other instances where slowly but steadily, machines have partially or fully replaced humans. Consequently, the question arises whether machines aim at aiding man or rather replacing him?An example can be taken that of ‘Amazon’ which has more than 1,00,000 robots working inside its warehouses. However, it still has 5,00,000 human labour in employment. The company claims that these machines lack skills such as “dexterity, adaptiveness, and common sense”[1]which are present only in man, as a result the robots cannot replace human labour entirely. Hence, the relation between man and machine appears to be both complementary as well as antagonistic. The question arises-Why is man being pitted against machines? The answer is simple: Manual labour in spite of all its pros cannot compete with machines in terms of speed and efficiency.Such a pittingtakes away all kinds ofcreative skills from the worker. It eliminates any possibility of creativity or conceptual thought since the worker has to function in accordance to the functioning of the machine.

It is a known fact that labouring is a never-ending process since human needs are never-ending. With rapid improvement in technology, people need everything better and quicker and man, despite all his abilities, cannot match machines in terms of speed and mass production. Machines have already started guiding men, compelling them to adapt according to it. Nowadays, it is very common to hear that “men are becoming slaves to the machines they themselves have invented.” With the invention of automated machines, them replacing man seems imminent . For instance, almost all large manufacturing factories (e.g.-car manufacture) use automated machines to produce items efficiently and at a lower cost.

In the modern time there is fear of the fact that machines might take over the world, rendering men unemployed among other things,The way the Industrial revolution led to the emergence of a working class, automation might result in the creation of an ‘un-working class’.This has inculcated a fear of massive unemployment amongst the human population. While this topic remains highly debatable since it is assumed that there are specific tasks which might always remain beyond the capabilities of a machine and require human hands. However, for machines to completely replace man in all work spaces they only need to outdo him in certain skills and abilities that a particular work demands.In such a scenario, it would nearly be impossible for man to operate/control machines which are smarter than him. Man, thus appears to be at a losing battle with the Machines.