Widening the Gap

Tyler Powell

According to the United States Census Bureau, the current U.S. population is 307,428,406 with a net gain of one person every 10 seconds. In a country where a common argument is that there aren't enough jobs for everyone, these statistic are alarming, furthering accusations against immigrants for "taking American jobs." Others believe they are filling the tedious, repetitive rolls that nobody wants, like cleaning or building. Immigrants aren't the only ones in such a job market though; since robots first emerged, they have been used for jobs that require high endurance and concentration on repeated tasks, like assembly line production. Science.jrank.org states,

"For most people, assembly line work eventually entailed a physical and mental drudgery that became seriously counterproductive. Often the work itself was detrimental to an individual's physical and mental well-being, and from a manufacturer's standpoint, this usually resulted in diminished productivity."

What some people fail to see is that where the laborers lose their jobs, the Robotic Engineers and Computer Scientists who have a college degree and better education, actually gain employment. While a robot may do the work of multiple workers, it takes a team to build, program, and repair them. Modern businesses place a special interest in those people who build similar systems because the systems increase manufacturing productivity, which means more money in the long run.

Workers with little-to-no education are finding that getting a new job that pays well is difficult because the jobs that were previously available to them are now being filled with more capable instruments and that careers are slowly becoming exclusive to those with college degrees. As industry continues its upward climb toward perfect productivity, the gap between the low-income, uneducated mass and the industry leading, high-income college graduates widens, proving the importance of a good, solid education for personal economic stability.