[HN Gopher] The rise of robots increases job insecurity and mala...
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The rise of robots increases job insecurity and maladaptive
workplace behaviors [pdf]
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 65 points
Date : 2022-10-12 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apa.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apa.org)
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| The rise of robots in the US will, sincerely and with no irony:
|
| - 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.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Have some links to peer-reviewed research to back up those
| claims?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Six studies--including two pilot studies, an archival study
| across 185 U.S. metropolitan areas (Study 1), a preregistered
| experiment conducted in Singapore (Study 2), an experience-
| sampling study among engineers conducted in India (Study 3), and
| an online experiment (Study 4)
|
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| Or Japan or Korea --two countries that have embraced robotics.
| psychomugs wrote:
| You could say the same ("but what about $GROUP") for quite
| literally any such study. Sampling broadly is an oft-
| insurmountable part of such research; this demographic spread -
| along with the relatively large collaboration across six
| universities - is actually much larger than typical study
| samples that involve only WEIRD [1] populations.
|
| [1] "White, Educated, Independent, Rich, Democratic"
| andrenth wrote:
| _Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief
| that machines on net balance create unemployment.
|
| 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._
| pydry wrote:
| https://qz.com/962427/what-its-like-to-be-a-modern-engraver-...
|
| 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.
| LegitShady wrote:
| 1123581321 wrote:
| A PDF research paper on APA.org is pretty trustworthy.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Is _that_ why people care? I 'm also old, and had completely
| forgotten how exploitable the Adobe viewers were for several
| decades.
|
| Now that those links get opened in browser sandboxes, I assume
| the concern has diminished.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2022/10/robots-workp...
| legulere wrote:
| Nowadays pdf get opened in the browser in a javascript viewer
| that is sandboxed.
| LegitShady wrote:
| you say that like chrome hasn't had pdf vulnerabilities
| patched in their javascript viewer, but of course they have.
| This idea of just linking to PDFs and having people click on
| them seems like a bad idea.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Why is it a worse idea than providing links to HTML?
|
| https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2021-21106/
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Your original comment is flagged, but I am generally wary
| of clicking on pdf links. Especially on mobile where I have
| to download and open in a different app. That's just a huge
| pain.
| ectopod wrote:
| Many people will be reading the pdf in their browser using the
| browser's js pdf renderer.
|
| This is safer than running arbitrary js from the web, which
| most people also do.
|
| So I guess most people won't worry about pdfs especially.
| Animats wrote:
| The solution they prescribe, "An Intervention to Reduce Job
| Insecurity: Self-Affirmation", is rather scary. It's blaming the
| workers. Or getting them to delude themselves. This is a
| political position.
|
| 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.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| > It's blaming the workers. Or getting them to delude
| themselves. This is a politica position
|
| 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)"
| pj_mukh wrote:
| tl;dr: Robots make people _perceive_ that their jobs are more
| insecure. Self-affirmation might fix it.
| throwawayoc22 wrote:
| So here's a data point: I work for a company
| https://6river.com/ that makes warehouse robots - or co-bots as
| our founders call them - and the feedback we've gotten is the
| total opposite. Warehouse workers love our robots, we've had
| reports of workers leaving for higher paying jobs at other
| warehouse and returning specifically because our robots make
| the work so much easier. So I guess it depends on the work and
| the type of automation.
|
| I used a throwaway because I know my co-workers read HN!
| petra wrote:
| I'm curious about something: Which warehousing
| niches(types/sizes of warehouses/companies) will automation
| get into, and which niches it won't ?
|
| And what will be the future jobs in a modern warehouse in 10
| years ?
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| If this is true that would give a big opportunity for your
| company to release studies directly countering studies like
| the one you're responding to. Is your company planning on
| doing so?
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >Self-affirmation might fix it.
|
| ...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.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Ya the more this is said out loud, the better we can prep for
| whatever this part of the workforce can do next.
|
| 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.
| deelowe wrote:
| Right. The greater good argument isn't particularly
| comforting when you're the sacrificial lamb.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Like Jack Handey?
|
| I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, Robots Can't
| Replace Me!
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _Like Jack Handey?
|
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Smalley
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Handey
| debacle wrote:
| Take anything from the APA with a gigantic grain of salt.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| debacle wrote:
| A cautionary note is not a shallow dismissal. In your action,
| ensure you are _improving_ discourse, not eliminating it.
| dang wrote:
| hwbehrens gave you a nice explanation, but maybe I'll reply
| too.
|
| It was shallow because it was (1) low-information*; (2) a
| cliche; 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.
| hwbehrens wrote:
| I think what made the parent comment "shallow" was because
| you didn't justify your claim with any supporting context.
| For example, claiming the APA has a track record of
| misleading claims (ideally with supporting evidence) would
| have added some depth to your comment. Or perhaps you feel
| that all academic communication is biased by misaligned
| incentives, who knows? The reader can't extrapolate any
| further discussion topics from the initial comment, and as
| such it does not effectively promote discussion.
| tuatoru wrote:
| In reality automation is about individual tasks, not jobs, which
| are collections of tasks. The makeup of jobs may change.
|
| 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...
| pestaa wrote:
| The number of references is staggering, especially considering
| the length of the paper. Is it a sign of deep research, or can it
| be a red flag, or it's not unusual?
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| The APA is a very prolific organization. It is common for
| highly researched topics to have a strong breadth and depth to
| the citations.
| hwbehrens wrote:
| I suspect that it will vary by field -- perhaps this is normal
| for psychology, but looking at recent accepted papers from the
| same journal, they mostly had 60-70 citations. Such a dramatic
| deviation from the "norms" of the venue is at least a yellow
| flag, but I would hesitate to say that it's necessarily a red
| one.
|
| 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.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| From my days as an undergrad in psychology, I do recall there
| being a growing trend of citing even the smallest thing, for
| the sake of internal consistency within the overall body of
| knowledge.
| mattkrause wrote:
| 224 is a lot, and some of them seem a little gratuitous:
| "For example, robots can outperform humans in manual labor
| (Frey & Osborne, 2017; Murphy, 2017)"
|
| However, I wouldn't read a lot into it. In general, I think
| we'd be better off if people cited more widely instead of just
| choosing the "classic" reference from a famous group (that may
| not even be the first/best work on the topic).
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| It's not really much different than doing something like
| citing Stack Overflow or a book in your code comments.
| jrumbut wrote:
| I would say that, when combined with other signs in the
| writing, it points to the authors being quite meticulous and
| thorough in their research.
|
| 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.
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