A fundamental illusion in robotics is the belief that improvements in robots will liberate humanity from "hazardous a...
MasonDeesJuly 4, 2022
Choice A
I went with choice A, and my reasoning was that there's no clear link between demeaning work and repairing robots. Yeah, the author does say the goal of the robots is to eliminate "demeaning work" and that they'll actually continue the existence of mechanical labor, but where does he state that mechanical work as being necessarily demeaning?
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I agree that a flaw in the argument is that the author fails to explicitly make the connection between "demeaning work" and the "least expensive, least skilled" work. While this is not a huge jump, we cannot say for sure that the least expensive and least skilled work is demeaning. It is quite possible there are forms of work that are low paid, and require no prerequisite skills, yet are not demeaning.
However, this is not the flaw that A is describing. A brings in a completely different scenario that would have no bearing on whether robots, when used, will increase or decrease demeaning work.
E describes another flaw in the argument- that even if robot maintenance is demeaning (which we cannot prove it is), it is possible that the new demanding work will be smaller in volume that the demeaning work it replaced. This is an example of an argument that is flawed for more than one reason. The flaw we expect to see in the answer choice is not there, but we could still find an answer choice that describes another flaw.
