07/31/2017
Participation Supplement 8
Today in class, we talked about an issue that I have thought and heard a lot about in the past.  That’s the issue of factory jobs returning to the US.  People will argue that we need to have these factory jobs come back so that we can have lower unemployment rates and offer more people meaningful careers.  However, what most people fail to understand is that these jobs are coming back differently.  These jobs are almost exclusively automated by robots.  Unless the company is like GM, where they do still offer people jobs, although the jobs are really just watching over the robots or guiding them.  Even in the GM jobs, the robot is doing all the work.  As a courtesy they are giving jobs to the general public, which they don’t really need to, they would probably be better off from a reliability and integrity standpoint if they only used robots.  This issue is also made difficult because various politicians have promised to get these jobs back in the US, but they never mention that the jobs won’t hire as many people due to the automation.  It’s kind of a half-truth situation.  We also looked at how images are an important medium for communication.  Images can portray much and make us feel differently than words.  They can appeal to sensitive areas of our lives.  Just like in the NASA image that we looked at in class, the comparison between earth and Kepler 452B I believe it was called.  Anyone can easily see the similarities and differences between the two planets.  It will excite some and frighten others.  It’s easy though to see why NASA would include such an image.  It provokes an understanding from the person looking at it that they wouldn’t have otherwise.