How the Great Automation Will Kill People

How Robot adoption will actually increase mortality globally

This is an Op-Ed about the impact of robots and A.I. on society according to science, with some speculation about the future.

I write a lot about Artificial Intelligence and automation on my Newsletters. Some aspects of automation have been brushed aside by the financial elite of the world including the World Economic Forum that does not write about both sides of the issues, the benefits and the costs to society.

If a publication or an organization doesn’t cover both sides of a story, that’s not journalism, it’s propaganda and public relations. Sadly today too much of how we write about automation, digital transformation and A.I. is in this lane full of human bias.

What they don’t tell you is that there are real costs to humans in disruption. People literally get hurt in innovation and periods of technological transformation. Automation and consumer convenience, are not all good and there is a stark price we don’t often talk about. People bear the burden of our so-called digital convenience, and most of the time we never even know.

The Negatives of Automation are Being Suppressed

At a time of inflation coinciding with digital transformation and labor shortages accelerating automation during the pandemic and post covid-19, I think we all need to be aware of the salient issues about the fragile state of things. About a week ago a study widely addressed this concern of mine with some actual data.

We haven’t even yet reached full-stride in how robots take human jobs in society. While we make tiny robots to explore the Moon, space drones and military robots look promising.

Five tiny robots designed and made in Mexico will blast off for the moon later this year, part of a first-of-its-kind scientific mission that envisions the two-wheeled bots scrambling across the lunar surface while taking sophisticated measurements. The so-called nano robots developed by researchers at Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM) will work together like a swarm of bees, the senior scientist told Reuters.

Closer to Earth, we are starting to have some examples of sectors where robots have displaced real blue collar workers and have some data on what happens to these people. They don’t simply miraculously get re-trained and become programmers, or some such positively spun narrative. One of the best examples we have here is the U.S. manufacturing sector.

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Study by Yale and University of Pennsylvania on Automation, Robots and Mortality

The automation of U.S. manufacturing—robots replacing people on factory floors—is fueling rising mortality rate among America's working-age adults, according to a new study by researchers at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.

• The study, published Feb. 23 in the journal Demography, found evidence of a causal link between automation and increasing mortality, driven largely by increased "deaths of despair," such as suicides and drug overdoses.

• This is particularly true for males and females aged 45 to 54, according to the study. But researchers also found evidence of increased mortality across multiple age and sex groups from causes as varied as cancer and heart disease.

We know that as a population ages, more robots are introduced to try to make up for the talent shortages and lack of productivity. In Japan, South Korea and China we are seeing this trend in full-force now. With the Great Resignation, a large segment of our working population actually took early retirement.

Death By Robots; Deaths of Despair will Only Increase

As people get disrupted from a job, some of them spiral downwards leading to even “suicides of despair”. Let’s call it what it is, robots can be lethal. I by this I don’t just mean the killer robots national defenses and military sectors are training. So what can help the impact of automation? Public policy, including strong social-safety net programs, higher minimum wages, and limiting the supply of prescription opioids, can blunt automation's effects on a community's health, the researchers concluded. In an era of inflation, house unaffordability and increasing debt, this is a laughable conclusion.

When it comes to the adoption of robots, aging alone accounts for 35 percent of the variation among countries.

However the social class wars that have bifurcated American politics will likely mean BigTech and the Great Autocation becomes a boiling point for disgruntled young Americans who don’t have a college education. You can imagine how the social unrest will scale with a wider adoption of robots, A.I. and automation in American society in the years ahead. This will of course be happening all around the world at roughly the same time.

"For decades, manufacturers in the United States have turned to automation to remain competitive in a global marketplace, but this technological innovation has reduced the number of quality jobs available to adults without a college degree—a group that has faced increased mortality in recent years," said lead author Rourke O'Brien, assistant professor of sociology in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The Great Automation occurs in my opinion in a rapid advancement of robotics and AI that begin to simultaneously displace jobs and people at a rapid rate. I believe this is likely to occur the most in the 2035 to 2065 period. During this period there’s no way as many new jobs are created as are disrupted. This is a fiction that was created by the financial elite and backed up by many papers and studies, peddled by the likes of the World Economic Forum.

Using exogenous variation in automation to support causal inference, this particular study found that increases in automation over the period 1993–2007 led to substantive increases in all-cause mortality for both men and women aged 45–54. The problem is as automation is picking up in the 2020s it happens in the future at a much greater scale than simply the manufacturing sector of the 1990s. It also happens globally at the same time across many different sectors simultaneously.

America in particular seems even more ripe do deaths and civil unrest of despair due in part to automation and disruption. For instance, since 1980, mortality rates in the United States have diverged from those in other high-income countries. Today, Americans on average die three years sooner than their counterparts in other wealthy nations. The opiod crisis and movements of the far right and populism can stoke feelings of alienation and a mistrust in Government, BigTech and folk that don’t get disrupted in the ruthless pyramid Capitalism we have created.

The accelerating mortality caused by the rise of robots is a ticking time bomb very much tied to demographic pyramids.

“Death by robots” might sound like an absurd narrative to many of you today, but your kids might not end up feeling quite the same way.

What the 1990s Taught us about the Great Automation of the 2030s

Automation is a major source of the decline of U.S. manufacturing jobs along with other factors, including competition with manufacturers in countries with lower labor costs, such as China and Mexico. Some of the disenfranchised don’t fight back, they decline and die, well before their time or a normal lifespan. These are the forgotten souls and a painful secret we have suppressed about technological automation.

Previous research has shown that the adoption of industrial robots caused the loss of an estimated 420,000 to 750,000 jobs during the 1990s and 2000s, the majority of which were in manufacturing. The Great Automation in our near (or medium) future, will be at the scale of many millions of jobs, we don’t even know how many, but we could estimate the shock, and it will be enormous in our lifetime.

• To understand the role of automation on increased mortality, O'Brien and co-authors Elizabeth F. Blair and Atheendar Venkataramani, both of the University of Pennsylvania, used newly available measures that chart the adoption of automation across U.S. industries and localities between 1993 and 2007.

• They combined these measures with U.S. death-certificate data over the same time period to estimate the causal effect of automation on the mortality of working age adults at the county level and for specific types of deaths.

Relationship Between Robots per 1,000 Workers on Mortality Discovered

They even created a basic formula to how the “death by robots” scenario plays itself out. According to the study, each new robot per 1,000 workers led to about eight additional deaths per 100,000 males aged 45 to 54 and nearly four additional deaths per 100,000 females in the same age group.

China is eager to expand its level of automation in the coming years and it has been targeting a place in the world's top-10 nations for robot density by 2020 which it did achieve. As we know, China and India is home to many men (not necessarily in the workforce) who will never be able to get married. You can imagine what that does to their mortality and quality of life during their lifespan.

Because aging populations are more vulnerable to disruption by robots, and countries with too many people will experience more of a squeeze from robots entering the workforce, developed and developing economies will both get hit by the Great Automation and it will lead to a lot of “deaths by robots”. The World Economic Forum and other optimistic organizations like Singularity Group, don’t go into such details.

The financial elite have a lot to gain from more robots entering the labor market however the mainstream news is unlikely to cover it well. Just as Microsoft and Google have a lot riding on the “AI for Good” to shelter them from the rally that will inevitably occur against monopolistic BigTech. As LinkedIn’s algorithm squeezes the number of people I’m able to bring to Substack from my LinkedIn Newsletter, I’m very aware of this.

The Opioid Crisis + Disruption is a Toxic Combination

The analysis showed that automation caused a substantial increase in suicides among middle-aged men and drug overdose deaths among men of all ages and women aged 20 to 29.

I doubt very much American has social policies to uplift its already dysfunctional healthcare system. Indeed for GenZ the prospects of American Capitalism aren’t great, decades of a slowing economy and now inflation and student loan debt really doesn’t equate to a level playing field. Then in around a couple of decades many of their jobs and skills will start to become obsolete.

The study according to their summary says: Disaggregating by cause, we find evidence that automation is associated with increases in drug overdose deaths, suicide, homicide, and cardiovascular mortality, although patterns differ by age and sex. We further examine heterogeneity in effects by safety net program generosity, labor market policies, and the supply of prescription opioids.

Automation has a Social Cost on Marginalized Groups

Automation is directly associated with:

• Suicides

• Drug overdose deaths

• Homicides

• Cardiovascular mortality

• Loneliness and mental health issues

The problem then becomes not if your job will be disrupted in the future, but if the robots and A.I. will actually indirectly lead to your early demise and mortality. People oddly don’t have a valid frame of reference to understand what is coming. It’s not just robots and A.I. but it’s many varieties of these, their descendents and how they scale compared to our human professional skills.

There is significant disconnect to prevent the human impact of the Great Automation on real people. Commercial interests are outripping human well-being at a scale we haven’t ever seen before previously in the modern era.

While robots and A.I. are supposed to be serving the common prosperity and well-being of all people, that won’t actually be the case. At least, not in America.

Our Developed Economy Aging Populations Will Need More Robots

The Researchers also made some other rather bizarre conclusions that are somewhat counter-intuitive. Overall, automation could be linked to 12% of the increase in drug overdose mortality among all working-age adults during the study period. How high will it be in the Great Automation with 30x the levels of disruption?

The researchers also discovered evidence associating the lost jobs and reduced wages caused by automation with increased homicide, cancer, and cardiovascular disease within specific age-sex groups. In other words, as one might expect their mental health and physical health was impacted leading sometimes to death.

What happens in Germany, Japan and South Korea with aging populations and their more rapid adoption of robots per 1,000 workers suggests that their systems may be able to cope with the strain better but in America, there’s an existential risk that the Great Automation will lead to untold human suffering due to the rising wealth inequality in society, especially along racial and gender lines.

Deaths of Despair, Technological Loneliness and Social Unrest likely to Plague us During the Great Automation

Balancing labor shortages, automation and mental health will become pretty much impossible. The Covid-19 pandemic and the Fed’s response to it likely mean digital transformation and wealth inequality were both accelerated about ten years, in the span of three years. Evictions, homelessness and people finding themselves more disenfranchised (the Black American unemployment rate for example) and rapid inflation sets up more pain during the Great Automation - of the decades ahead.

When automation hits the sector of the population that appears most vulnerable to disruption are between 45 and 55 years old. To summarize, the study, published Feb. 23 in the journal Demography, found evidence of a causal link between automation and increasing mortality, driven largely by increased “deaths of despair,” such as suicides and drug overdoses. This is particularly true for males and females aged 45 to 54, according to the study.

If you are in the bottom 30% of society and you get disrupted in the future, chances are you will be more vulnerable to an early death. The “freedom convoys” demonstrate an element of social unrest that may be related to groups of the population more vulnerable to technological disruption in the future. There’s evidence of massive social unrest related to the coming Great Automation. A world of more A.I. and where there’s more and more robots per 1,000 human workers.

So the next time a Futurist tells you that Automation and A.I. is good, you can remind them that it will also kill people. We cannot always believe the hype of Silicon Valley that technological innovation is universally positive, because that’s simply not true.

During the 2035 to 2065 period where the Great Automation occurs, I cannot even imagine the purge that might take place in a natural selection among humanity in that dystopian version of unequal Capitalism that will just be the new normal.

While I’m dedicated to covering advances in A.I. and the various topics I try to cover, I’m always studying the pros and cons of the social impact this will actually have on people. Most people just assume that this is a fine side effect of progress, until it happens to them and impacts them personally.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/doi/10.1215/00703370-9774819/294500/Death-by-Robots-Automation-and-Working-Age

The reality is automation and robots are increasing mortality in the U.S. and elsewhere and most of us are not even talking about it or aware that this is happening. Robots increase our productivity, but they also increase our death-rates. Hopefully that’s a temporary finding, though that will remain to be seen.

What might be the unintended consequences of building a society of robots, automation and A.I on the human psyche, our communities and the futures of our young people?

We haven’t studied it, we are a living experiment as it happens. Just the impact of social media on mental health is proof of a lot of profit traded for human suffering. Companies like Meta and Google were built on human suffering and human data of the addiction they created in products like Facebook and YouTube. Ironically these same channels likely perpetuate the social unrest of the disrupted masses.

Death By Robots and Human Extinction by Artificial Intelligence

There is an existential risk though it is small, that our creations will actually lead us down a path that could be dangerous. Technological loneliness and the rise of opiod deaths might just be little signals, but definately we aren’t listening.

We don’t easily connect the dots between automation of workers with social unrest. Military robots and nucleur weapons under the purview of A.I. are also threatening our reality and future of warfare. Human dependency on the internet and an increasingly fake algorithmic society is yet another sign that the Metaverse we create might be toxic for our humanity.

Powerful companies will emerge that may become as powerful as countries and nation-states in how humans are enslaved in a deeply unequal dystopia of consumer based economies. When we begin to augment ourselves more intimately with A.I. and genomic “enhancements” it will also complicate our relationship to the digitally transformed aristocracy of the financial elite.

Meanwhile more robots will find their way into our cities and lives, just as A.I. will begin to integrate with all of human activities. More robots will take on tasks and jobs once done by a person. More A.I. will become implicated in the tasks of white collar workers, partially disrupting them as well over time. Whether you work in law, accounting or medicine, some aspects of what you do will be totally different in just the next 10 or 20 years.

• Even in 2022 for the most part we don’t take deaths of despair, technological loneliness or the disruptive impact of automation seriously.

In the future we will, because it will continue to kill people. It will continue to spawn social unrest that tells the story of a financial elite that drove conditions worse for their own benefit. A.I doesn’t even have the guard rails and regulations any mature society would have implored for the Internet itself. But the internet is just a launch pad for more A.I. and robots.

From the beginning of the Internet to the Great Automation after all, takes a good 50 years. As a Millennial I’ve already had to pivot my career many times and learn new skills, maybe you will too. But we should not lie to ourselves, we should not say that A.I and Robots don’t disrupt or kill us. Just because it may not be happening directly to us, doesn’t mean it’s not occuring.

WHAT IS THE GREAT AUTOMATION?

The study explains how over the past few decades, manufacturers have started automating (replacing humans with robots) to remain competitive in the global marketplace. In the decades ahead, this will be occurring in nearly every industry simultaneously.

According to the study, each new robot per 1,000 workers led to about eight additional deaths per 100,000 males aged 45 to 54 and nearly four additional deaths per 100,000 females in the same age group. Is that an acceptable cost of automation to human society and for an elite and privileged to prosper?

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