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The rise of robots increases job insecurity and maladaptive workplace behaviors [pdf]
- LegitShady 4y ago
- giuliomagnifico 4y agohttps://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2022/10/robots-workplace-job-insecurity https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2022/10/robots-workp...
- legulere 4y agoNowadays pdf get opened in the browser in a javascript viewer that is sandboxed.
- LegitShady 4y agoyou 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 4y agoWhy is it a worse idea than providing links to HTML? https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2021-21106/ https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2021-21106/
- dec0dedab0de 4y agoYour 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 4y agoMany 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.
- 1123581321 4y agoA PDF research paper on APA.org is pretty trustworthy.
- shadowgovt 4y agoIs 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.
- pj_mukh 4y agotl;dr: Robots make people perceive that their jobs are more insecure. Self-affirmation might fix it.
- JohnJamesRambo 4y agoLike Jack Handey? I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, Robots Can’t Replace Me!
- dec0dedab0de 4y agoLike 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/Stuart_Smalley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Handey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Handey
- JohnJamesRambo 4y agoOh goodness you are so right. No amount of affirmations will make me feel better about this.
- throwawayoc22 4y agoSo here's a data point: I work for a company https://6river.com/ 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 4y agoI'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 ?
- debacle 4y agoTake anything from the APA with a gigantic grain of salt.
- dang 4y ago"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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- debacle 4y agoA cautionary note is not a shallow dismissal. In your action, ensure you are improving discourse, not eliminating it.
- hwbehrens 4y agoI 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.
- dang 4y agohwbehrens gave you a nice explanation, but maybe I'll reply too. 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.
- pestaa 4y agoThe 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?
- mattkrause 4y ago224 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 4y agoIt’s not really much different than doing something like citing Stack Overflow or a book in your code comments.
- mattkrause 4y agoSure. I was just surprised because my fields cite a bit more sparingly (and journals often limit you to ~50-75 per paper). 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.
- jrumbut 4y agoI 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.
- hwbehrens 4y agoI 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.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago> 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.
- psychomugs 4y agoYou 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”
- welshwelsh 4y agoThe W usually stands for "western," not "white" lol
- kwhitefoot 4y agoMy point was that the title and conclusions were expressed in a more universal way than warranted by the population studied
- mc32 4y agoOr Japan or Korea --two countries that have embraced robotics.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago“Although human–robot collaborations can create new jobs and increase productivity, pundits often warn about how robots might replace humans at work and create mass unemployment. Despite these warnings, relatively little research has directly assessed how laypeople react to robots in the workplace.“ 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.
- tuatoru 4y agoIn 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-robotic-bricklayers https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/where-are-the-rob...
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago> These guys write as though they are desk bound. 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.
- tuatoru 4y agoOh, I sort of realized that. I have seen some researchers now and then at work. 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.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y agoAh, that makes sense, then. 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]. [1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9515315 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9515315
- andrenth 4y agoAmong 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 4y agohttps://qz.com/962427/what-its-like-to-be-a-modern-engraver-the-most-automated-job-in-the-united-states/ 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.
- mattigames 4y agoUnlike the cotton spining machine the aim of the robots is explicitly aimed to reduce the number of humans on any economic manufacturing chain, it has no resemblance to cotton-spinning specially when the space for growth has been reduced so much (unless you subscribe to the believe it is infinite), there is an obsession to believe everything has already happened before and that any concerns with tech can be dismissed by cherry picking examples of anybody complaining about any tech in the past.
- thelock85 4y agoWhat bearing does an increase in the overall number of industry workers have on whether or not the manual weavers and spinners were justified in their concerns (with respect to their own livelihood) about automation? 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.
- Animats 4y agoThe 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 4y ago> It’s blaming the workers. Or getting them to delude themselves. This is a political 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)”
- Animats 4y agoEnabling workers to cope with the existing situation. Not organize to change it.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago”cope by affirming one’s self-worth and their ability to confront change at work” Literally about how to confront change at work and how to feel better about yourself.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoIf the change were say the introduction of child labor at factories during the industrial revolution, would teaching acceptance and self esteem produce the best outcome for those workers? 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.
- howmayiannoyyou 4y agoThe 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 4y agoHave some links to peer-reviewed research to back up those claims? > 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.
- krageon 4y agoThink about how often prices are raised "due to increasing costs" and how often they are lowered for any reason. One is systemic, the other would probably be minor news.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y agoMakes sense, definitely. I’m just suggesting that robotics could reduce the frequency of increasing costs being used to raise prices. Aggregation of marginal savings, etc.
- krageon 4y agoI don't see how it makes sense to think this in a world where we have plenty of examples of robotic labour (stuff like factory produced cookies or cars). The increased use of robots has not assisted in making prices increase less at all. Such places are managed by modern business people, who are always looking for more money and absolutely never think of ethics or what makes sense. Within the context of "whatever I can get away with", you would not raise prices less. You'd raise them exactly as much as before and just extract more profit.
- eucryphia 4y agoOn Instagram I follow a gentleman who still thatches roofs in England, marvellous craftsmanship, but only for the wealthy elite heritage graded property owners. I recall the old saying; humans are the only computer that can be mass produced with unskilled labour.