(pretty) Please Grade my Essay

niccconway
Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:39:03 +0000

I am working hard to study for the September ACT and I feel the writing test is my weakest area. I would appreciate someone grading and giving me feedback on my essay. This is my first ACT essay, but I appreciate your candid feedback. Thank you!

Prompt: Intelligent Machines

Many of the goods and services we depend on daily are now supplied by intelligent, automated machines rather than human beings. Robots build cars and other goods on assembly lines, where once there were human workers. Many of our phone conversations are now conducted not with people but with sophisticated technologies. We can now buy goods at a variety of stores without the help of a human cashier. Automation is generally seen as a sign of progress, but what is lost when we replace humans with machines? Given the accelerating variety and prevalence of intelligent machines, it is worth examining the implications and meaning of their presence in our lives.

Perspective One: What we lose with the replacement of people by machines is some part of our own humanity. Even our mundane daily encounters no longer require from us basic courtesy, respect, and tolerance for other people.

Perspective Two: Machines are good at low-skill, repetitive jobs, and at high-speed, extremely precise jobs. In both cases they work better than humans. This efficiency leads to a more prosperous and progressive world for everyone.

Perspective Three: Intelligent machines challenge our long-standing ideas about what humans are or can be. This is good
because it pushes both humans and machines toward new, unimagined possibilities.

You interact with others everywhere you go during a normal day. At stores, cashiers check you out and at school you are taught by your teacher, while sitting next to your classmates, but more and more the human interactions are decreasing. Now at some stores you can check yourself out, in school you can go on the internet to learn more about the Civil War, and instead of talking to your classmates, you can just text them. These tasks that you used to have to interact with others to do now can be replaced with machines. Although machines make life efficient and push us to discover new things, they take jobs away from humans and reduce our human interactions on a daily basis.

At the grocery store when you go to check out you look for the shortest line, the one that seems the most efficient. Nowadays this line is the self-check out one. You don’t have to talk to someone or hand your card over to have someone else swipe it, you can just do it yourself. The machine also doesn’t make any mistakes of scanning things twice or calculating the totals wrong, it is consistent and precise. A cashier could make these mistakes but mistakes are part of human nature just like socializing which you lose with a machine.

Machines that are exact and efficient didn’t appear over night, they were created by humans, through trial and error, over many years. Once humans made one machine they continued to invent new ones improving each time. This constant push for new technology has pushed humans to be the best they can be. The more advanced the machines get though, the less humans have to work to make new machines. They can just program machines to build it for them taking away the need for human labor.

When human labor is replaced by machines not only are we having more people out of jobs but we are interacting with humans less. With less human interactions we have less requirement to be respectful or tolerant of others because you don’t have to use the social skills with a machine. The lack of having to use these social skills everyday causes people to not have these skills anymore during actual human interactions.

Overall machines do improve our way of life and are the evidence of human accomplishments. Although these accomplishments are something to be proud of, we as humans have to keep in mind that the more efficient way of doing things isn’t always the best way. When you do have the time, talk to people and have a cashier check you out instead of a machine so the machines don’t totally take the place of human labor. Most of all though, make sure you stay aware of the common courtesies that you should have so when you do interact with other people even if you don’t have to use those social skills with machines.