Transcripts
B Well, you could argue that young people are forced to use social media because they are frightened of missing out on things.
b A Are you going on holiday soon? B Yes, next week. A Have you booked a hotel yet? B No. I don’t know what to do. I hate using online hotel booking sites. Every time you leave the site the price goes up and the room you want to book disappears.
A You could just call the hotel? B That’s true. A Have you started your packing? B Not yet. I haven’t got a suitcase. I was thinking of buying one online, but you risk buying something that’s not actually very good, if you just follow online reviews. A Yeah, but you’ve not got much time left.
c A Do teachers still use blackboards? B Generally, no. These days, children prefer learning through digital technology rather than traditional methods.
A How about you? B Well, my students expect me to use lots of multimedia in the classroom. I honestly prefer books and getting the students to write using a pen, so I do a bit of both.
d I’m a farmer here in Kenya and I use an app called iCow. It reminds me when to milk and helps me monitor my herd’s health. A lot of farmers in the area do the same. They all have mobile phones like me. I think having mobile phone access encourages farmers to be more organized.
6.2 A So, today I’ll be talking about automation with the chief designer for a well-known computer company. We’ll be exploring what automation means for us in the future. So, John, perhaps you could first define automation for us and put it into a historical context.
B Certainly. By automation, we mean the automatically controlled operation of a machine or a process, particularly when it is in place of human labour.
A So, robots building cars in factories, that kind of thing? B Yes, or more interestingly, computers designing the robots that build the cars.
A Right. And you say we are at a point in history when we should be talking seriously about automation. But it is not a new phenomenon, is it?
B Absolutely not. There are various claims to the first example of automation. For example, the waterwheel was invented thousands of years ago. Then there was the first industrial revolution in the 18th
changed the nature of manufacturing, introducing factories and mass production. Then, in the 19th
century, which completely century
we have electricity and the start of the assembly line. And, since the 1970s, of course, we have had information technology and computers doing all sorts of jobs.
A So, there is a long history of automation and yet you are suggesting we have reached a crucial stage.
B That’s right. In a few years’ time, digital technology will have completely changed the job market.
A But hasn’t automation always been an ongoing process? B Yes, of course. And throughout history, people have worried about machines taking their jobs. But the sheer scale and speed at which automation is currently happening makes this like a new industrial revolution. I predict that by 2040, computers will have taken up to 80% of today’s jobs and robots will be performing tasks we haven’t even imagined.
A You’re painting a rather bleak picture of the future! What can people do to protect themselves?
B Well, we just have to think carefully about which skills we should be focusing on. By this I mean we need to concentrate on developing skills and attributes which are distinctly human.
6.3 A Could you explain what you mean by ‘distinctly human skills’?
B Perhaps I can answer that by talking about skills which are not distinctly human. If we go back to past stages of automation, before the first industrial revolution, strength and stamina were important. People did all the hard work like digging and cutting.
A Right. B Then machines came along and these attributes became a lot less valuable. Machines did all the hard work.
A And how about skills like sewing or planting crops? Jobs that require more dexterity.
B As machines became more sophisticated, they started to take over these kinds of jobs as well. So people became machine operators rather than doing the work themselves.
A And how about basic mathematic skills. These were very important …
B Yes, before the calculator, anyone working in banking, for example, had to be able to do calculations without a machine.
A Of course nowadays, computers can calculate far quicker than any human.
B That’s right. And spelling. A very important skill for a long time, and then along comes the word processor with spell checking, and suddenly good spelling wasn’t so important.
A So, what does this mean for today’s young people? B Well, we don’t really know what jobs robots will be doing in the future …
A So how can we prepare? B Well, I’m saying it’s not enough to learn a skill like driving a truck or designing a house and assume that this guarantees us a job. Because computers are learning these sort of skills at an incredible rate.
English for the 21st
Century • Transcripts
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