In a recent article, I examined research from MIT that showed how investment in technologies, such as robotics, is often made to compensate for an aging workforce.
“Demographic change—aging—is one of the most important factors leading to the adoption of robotics and other automation technologies,” the researchers explain.
Indeed, when it comes to the adoption of technologies, such as robotics, the authors argue that the demographics of the population account for up to 35% of the variation between countries. What’s more, a similar phenomenon appears to be occurring within countries too, with metro areas in the United States that are aging faster, adopting automation technologies faster than areas that are aging more slowly.
“We provide a lot of evidence to bolster the case that this is a causal relationship, and it is driven by precisely the industries that are most affected by aging and have opportunities for automating work,” the researchers say.
Impact on older workers
A second study, from researchers at Yale, looks at the situation from the other perspective and finds that the rise in the use of robots on factory floors is also contributing to rising mortality rates among working-age adults across the United States.
The researchers believe they have found a causal link between investment in automation and rising mortality levels, with this rise largely due to so-called “deaths of despair”, such as drug overdoses and suicides. This was especially so for men and women aged between 45 and 54.
“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,” the researchers explain. “Our analysis shows that automation exacts a toll on the health of individuals both directly—by reducing employment, wages, and access to healthcare—as well as indirectly, by reducing the economic vitality of the broader community.”
Rising mortality
The researchers explain that rising mortality rates have been a growing problem in the United States since the 1980s, at which point things began to diverge from rates seen in other wealthy nations. Indeed, today, Americans typically die three years sooner than their peers in other similar nations.
There have been long-standing fears about the role automation has played in the decline in American manufacturing, with Columbia University’s Jason Resnikoff ably documenting the long discourse around the nature and impact of automation in the workplace since the phrase was first coined by Ford in the 1930s.
In Labor’s End, he highlights the seemingly perpetual battle between hype and reality, with advocates at various stages of the last 90 years suggesting that automation would save us from toil, free up time, make us more productive, and so on. Of course, that hasn’t really happened, and while the hardship Resnikoff documents is typically one of laborious and monotonous work rather than the destruction of work that is commonly used to frame the automation debate today, you do nonetheless feel a kindred spirit between the two works.
The impact of automation on mortality used new data that charts the adoption of automation technologies across both industries and localities between 1993 and 2007. This data was then combined with death-certificate data from the same time period to allow the researchers to estimate the causal impact automation was having on the mortality of working-age adults, both at the county level and also for specific types of death.
Negative impact
The researchers argue that each additional robot per 1,000 workers resulted in around 8 extra deaths per 100,000 men aged between 45 and 54, four additional deaths per 100,000 women of the same age.
There was a particularly strong rise in deaths by suicide among men in this age range, with drug overdoses also common, albeit among much younger men. The researchers also believe that the loss of income and work associated with an investment in automation could also be linked to a rise in cancer, homicide, and cardiovascular disease.
To mitigate these risks, the researchers urge policy makers to think afresh about bolstering the social safety net, especially in areas such as unemployment benefits and Medicaid. Given the nature of the deaths, they also suggest that targeted investments in areas such as drug addictions and mental health could also be extremely beneficial.
“Our findings underscore the importance of public policy in supporting the individuals and communities who have lost their jobs or seen their wages cut due to automation,” the researchers conclude. “A strong social safety net and labor market policies that improve the quality of jobs available to workers without a college degree may help reduce deaths of despair and strengthen the general health of communities, particularly those in our nation’s industrial heartland.”
