The rise of robots increases job insecurity and maladaptive workplace behaviors [pdf]
apa.org
apa.org
I suspect that the society in which the studies occurred might have more to do with the conclusion than the robots themselves. Had there been contributions from northern Europe where automation is often the only way to make an activity profitable the conclusion might have been a little more nuanced.
One of the main goals of the article appears to be fact-checking the claims made against robotics in industrialized nations that haven’t psychologically embraced robotics.
Other research would likely find different results in those cultures - e.g., people probably wouldn’t feel insecure in those cultures, and therefore wouldn’t have negative reactions coming from insecurities.
[1] “White, Educated, Independent, Rich, Democratic”
This has been a huge problem in the Rust Belt for years. People whose identity came from what they could do had it stripped from them. No solution seems in sight.
Quite the opposite. It is about enabling workers.
From the research article:
“The cognitive appraisal theory of stress argues that events are stressful when people appraise that they lack the capacity to cope with them. Self-affirmation therefore emphases that employees can cope by affirming one’s self-worth and their ability to confront change at work (Dunning, 2005; Schmeichel & Vohs, 2009; Sherman & Cohen, 2006)”
Hire an outsourced talk-therapy outfit like Modern Health to add to the HR bundle and they can fend for themselves.
Guilt-reduction doesn’t necessarily have to mean checklists of training videos that no one pays attention to.
Contracted talk-therapy is probably helpful for traumatic incidents like workplace shootings and could probably be implemented in a way that it is helpful for people feeling robot insecurities.
edit: [1] found that “results suggest a medium to large effect size for organizational training”, meaning training often works, but there are caveats.
[1] http://www.psychologie.uni-mannheim.de/cip/Tut/seminare_witt...
Literally about how to confront change at work and how to feel better about yourself.
I realize some changes are inevitable. It's debatable to what degree automation is unstoppable and to want degree it's desirable--all things considered. Maybe the future will see my comment here and compare it to luddites. Or perhaps they'll be too busy drowning in paperclips.
Child labor doesn’t seem to parallel exactly to this situation - applying this research, at that time, would be more about teaching the adults about how to healthily confront the reality of the situation and to remind them to value their own experience and wisdom, in the face of having to watch a child “take their job”.
Conversely, though, would modern workers embrace child labor in automating some of their tasks and welcome them to the team without hesitation?
"For example, robots can outperform humans in manual labor
(Frey & Osborne, 2017; Murphy, 2017)"
I use them for specific results or original/controversial ideas, but I wouldn't bother for something fairly obvious like "robots can sometimes outperform people." It seems like including an SO link for a bog standard for-loop in your code.
It also seems like they are combining several studies with different theories and supplementary data so it's bound to lead to a long citation list.
In CS research, this many references in a peer-reviewed work would be a red flag for me, however.
If it were an NSF grant proposal, then it would actually be fairly few -- for whatever reason grant proposals might have 300+. So, the context is very important when evaluating citation prevalence.
edit: See https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
I suspect it's less about the deep research and more about the tribe.
Is that what you are referring to?
They don’t appear to be citing Conniff anywhere at all.
Dekker, F., Salomons, A., & van der Waal, J. (2017). Fear of robots at work: The role of economic self-interest. Socio-economic Review, 15, 539–562. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwx005
McClure, P. K. (2018). “You’re fired,” says the robot: The rise of automation in the workplace, technophobes, and fears of unemployment. Social Science Computer Review, 36(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894 439317698637
edit:
Quoting Conniff: ”They [the Luddites] confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.””
Granted, I haven’t dug into Conniff’s source material, but I do see parallels to the OP article’s argument of there being insecurities about jobs, vis-a-vis the Luddites requiring membership in an apprenticeship guild and parallels to the article’s argument of insecurity leading to maladaptive behavior, vis-a-vis the Luddites characterizations of manufacturers as fraudulent and deceitful and the subsequent property damage.
It is. Luddites were no more disliked and feared technology than French anti-Uber taxi drivers hated and feared smartphones or indeed, strikers dislike and fear work itself. Destroying the machines was a tactic not a holy war.
The taxi one is notable because Forbes said that they were modern day luddites. They were ironically quite correct about that even though the protestors did not, as they claimed, actually hate smartphones.
- Allow politicians to continue to limit legal immigration to pander to parties who think this is good policy.
- Help businesses remain productive despite the ravages of opioids & meth in many regions of the country, that is starving employers of reliable low and moderately skilled labor.
- Offset declining US birth rates and increasing mortality rates.
- Makeup for shortfalls in "tooth to tail" and infantry shortfalls experienced by the US military, but likely at greatly increased expense due to unique defense spending economics.
- Revolutionize health and elder care in ways good and bad, but nonetheless necessary, providing great savings to providers - but probably no savings to consumers.
- Seriously reduce workplace injuries in some of the most dangerous jobs (eg. recycling), but wipe out smaller businesses who can't afford the CAPEX.
Or are people turning to opioids and meth in the absence of good job prospects? Do people who like their lives often let drugs destroy them?
Funnily enough, you've almost described the plot of the movie Sleep Dealer.
> providing great savings to providers - but probably no savings to consumers
For example, I’ve not studied much economics, but my undestanding is that the savings might come about through a reduction in inflation of prices.
I’m just suggesting that robotics could reduce the frequency of increasing costs being used to raise prices.
Aggregation of marginal savings, etc.
Let us turn to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The first chapter [...] is called “Of the division of labor,” and on the second page of this first chapter the author tells us that a workman unacquainted with the use of machinery employed in pin-making “could scarce make one pin a day, and certainly not twenty,” but with the use of this machinery he can make 4,800 pins a day. In the pin-making industry there was already, if machines merely throw men out of jobs, 99.98 percent unemployment.
Arkwright invented his cotton-spinning machinery in 1760. At the time it was estimated that there were in England 5,200 spinners using spinning wheels, and 2,700 weavers - in all 7,900 persons engaged in the production of cotton textiles. The introduction of Arkwright’s invention was opposed on the ground that it threatened the livelihood of the workers, and the opposition had to be put down by force. Yet in 1787 [...] the number of persons actually involved in the spinning and weaving of cotton had risen from 7,900 to 320,000, an increase of 4,400 percent.
With respect to that increase, there is context missing around the American South exponentially increasing cheap cotton exports around the same time, where coincidentally laborers were not even workers but enslaved peoples.
Even if the takeaway is livelihoods overall improved because of more jobs, then that is at the hidden cost of free (and grossly inhumane) labor elsewhere in the supply chain during the time period.
Not much has changed.
It's generally regarded as preferable to try and gently guide the pitchforks away from squishy human elites, though.
Robots and the inevitable march of technological progress are both good scapegoats for policymaking that very deliberately expands the precariat.
The paper doesn't start off well, with its first concrete example being bricklaying. Brian Potter, on his "Construction Physics" blog, has one or more posts discussing the history of attempts to automate that very task.[1] TL;DR: it's not going well, for a variety of reasons.
Most tasks are proving far harder to automate than expected, even the "easy" ones, for task-specific reasons that are obvious to anyone who has closely observed the task in the field. These guys write as though they are desk bound.
Woo-woo like affirmations? Seriously?
How about worker ownership and profit sharing, an improved social safety net, and free retraining?
1. "Where Are The Robotic Bricklayers?" https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/where-are-the-rob...
Psychology is not as desk-bound of a field as you might think. Industrial Organizational Psychology does get into the nitty gritty of the shop floor, for example.
It was just this paper's style of writing, and the not-very-hidden assumptions and approach in the intro, that prompted me to write that.
I like seeing assumptions being made and brought to the forefront, as that is the basis for some powerful mathematical techniques.
I do wonder, however, if the researchers are fully aware of collaborative robots. I see that a couple of their sources are based on collaborative robotics, but the authors may not have fully distinguished between collaborative and non-collaborative robots.
IEEE does appear to be studying the intersection of robotics and psychology though [1].
I recall the old saying; humans are the only computer that can be mass produced with unskilled labour.
I used a throwaway because I know my co-workers read HN!
I was supposed to feel proud of myself for this.
In the world as it currently exists, though, taking away people's financial support and forcing them to scrabble for another or face destitution and homelessness accomplishes none of those things. I'm actually kind of insulted that you think I'd think otherwise.
Problem is not reducing work, problem is that people need work to get salary that can be used to buy food, water, healthcare, shelter and other things one needs to survive. And at this point of capitalism there isn't a lot of room for growth. How many phones I would need to eat per year to support both automatisation and increased employment?
And what will be the future jobs in a modern warehouse in 10 years ?
...and by 'fix it' they mean, might make the workers more complacent until their jobs can be automated out of existence.
I don't buy the idea that 'robots will take our jobs', but it will damn sure take some jobs, with that portion being higher every decade.
It feels like we’re in a dangerous in between of applauding the technology and aggressively staying blind to the jobs it’s obviously coming for.
End result is a lot of pissed off truckers and warehouse workers who were sold for years on robotics improving productivity (or robot dogs not showing up patrolling neighborhoods without a real cop), and were stupid enough to trust tech product leads about it.
The tech improves productivity and might be intended as a ride-along in some cases, but the MBA at the user company will see it differently via labor costs.
I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, Robots Can’t Replace Me!
I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, Robots Can’t Replace Me!
You're thinking about Stuart Smalley, a character on SNL created and played by Al Franken. Jack Handey is an author who had some of his "deep thoughts" show up on SNL as text that was read.
It was shallow because it was (1) low-information*; (2) a cliché; and (3) untied to anything specific about the article.
Such comments are extremely common on the internet and tend to evoke more of the same, which leads to predictable/generic discussions. We're trying to avoid those.
* I know that people sometimes have a lot of information in their heads when they post a comment like that; the problem is that if you don't include that information explicitly in your comment, it's not available to the reader.