> From 1992 to 2017, workplace robots were responsible for 41 recorded deaths in the United States—and that’s likely an underestimate, especially when you consi

> From 1992 to 2017, workplace robots were responsible for 41 recorded deaths in the United States—and that’s likely an underestimate, especially when you consider knock-on effects from automation, such as job loss. That sentence right there makes me angry. Not at Schneier specifically, but at this blatant lie that somehow automation is responsible for even a fraction of job loss, unemployment, and the deaths that ensued. Wake the fuck up, people: it’s not robots, it’s capitalism. I was born in 1982. Many people my age still remember being promised that machines would lift the burden of work from us, that we’d all enjoy 3-day work weeks and so on. A huge amount of automation did happen, but the rest, not so much. There are many reasons for this, but a big one is that fewer and fewer people concentrated a bigger and bigger share of the profits. Now when we automate something, it’s not, as we were promised, to reduce the physical or mental burden of workers. It’s to reduce the costs associated with wages. The only way Schneier’s sentence makes sense is if we can’t change our economic system, but for some reason we can stop or limit automation. But even that isn’t going to work: capital owners are going to continue automating stuff as long as doing so increases their profits. (Edit: I guess that kind of criticism is not exactly welcome in a startup forum.)