Team: 4
School: Del Norte High
Area of Science: Behavioral and Social Sciences
Proposal: Problem:
The problem is that new technological innovations create an increase in unemployment rates. With the rapidly growing technology advancements, the use of humans for jobs like architect, health, composition, and more, are becoming less necessary. Technology changed the usual skill set of humans needed for certain jobs. These technological advances are also more likely to be used because they are able to create goods for a lesser amount of money compared to jobs taken by humans. This is a good thing for big corporations who would rather want more automation and less human labor costs, but on the other hand, can hurt the employment of people. We want to see which one is more beneficial to the world as a whole. These huge corporations and business managers believe these innovations will actually increase the diversity of jobs, while people who are looking for jobs may think it is limiting the amount of jobs left for humans. We want to see which one will cause the biggest change to the economy and how it achieves this.
Expected Results:
We expect that the need for humans doing manual labor jobs will go down, as well as the economy. According to Brookings.edu, ever since the threat of machines taking labor jobs away during the Industrial Revolution, many people, especially those who are older or less educated, will avoid going back to school to retrain themselves for a more innovative education to work with new technology. We believe the continued use of automation overtime will replace the necessity for human workers, and therefore, decrease job opportunities for the middle and lower classes. These classes do not always have the access to an education that is required for automation jobs, and will try to avoid having to go back to school to retrain for a different job. That is why we believe when more manual jobs go to machinery, unemployment could rise.
Plan Of Action:
Our plan of action is to create a simulation of unemployment rates in the past and in the future, with the assumption that technology advancements continue like they have. We also want to model how corporations can benefit with new automations but people working these current jobs will go unemployed. We want to create our code using python to represent the effect that every job given to a robot has an individual who would usually hold those positions. In addition, we want to incorporate how this will affect the economy as a whole.
Sponsor teacher: Karen Glennon
Project mentor: Patty Meyer
Team Members:
Sponsoring Teacher: Karen Glennon