essay - GMAT: Issue 21

In this age of automation, many people complain that humans are becoming subservient to machines. But, in fact, machines are continually improving our lives.

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion expressed above. Support your point of view with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.

Answer:
Are machines our enemies, or our friends? As the speaker mentions, there are people complaining the dark side of machines, such as machines are replacing people's jobs or depriving humanity from our lives, but I strongly believe that machines, or industrialization, improve our lives.

First of all, I believe that human beings are more flexible than thought. During the era of industrial revolution, many jobs in factories were certainly replaced by machines. I suppose, they thought that machines were their enemies and they felt that they were a kind of subservient to machines. Yet, looking back at the period following the era, we can see significant changes in the social structure and we can perceive good aspects that automation brought to us. Jobs in the primary and secondary sectors, that is, agricultural and industrial sectors, have been migrated to the third sectors, service industries, leading to current prosperity of our lives. Before the start of industrial change, most of people couldn't have comfortable dinner outside their homes as we do today. This is thanks to uprising service sectors, a.k.a. flexibility of human beings; We can invent and produce new types of jobs.

In addition, I'd like to mention the functional limitation of machines and human ability of controlling machines. As most of people know, it could be happened that machines, or robots, might have intelligence, and be in a position to control human beings contrarily. A lot of novels and movies, like "Journey to Space in 2001" and "Matrix", have been depicting this phenomenon. I, however, admitting possibility that that could be happened, strongly believe that implementing intelligence superior to ones of human beings in robots is substantially impossible and that human beings are capable of completely controlling robots. Not does a robot use a man, a man uses a robot.

To sum up, I agree with the statement that machines are continually improving our lives. It's because we are quite flexible about new environments, and because I believe that we can make "attacks" of robots impossible.