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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
I also work for a warehouse automation company. (We make the integrating software, not the robots.) A few months ago, my team got an email from management saying that, thanks to our hard work, one of our clients had been able to lay off 40 people, roughly 50% of their staff.
I'd feel proud about that. Whichever way you slice it, reducing work is good. Humans shouldn't waste their time doing stuff that robots or computers can do just as well.
> I'd feel proud about that. Whichever way you slice it, reducing work is good. Humans shouldn't waste their time doing stuff that robots or computers can do just as well.
Problem is not reducing work, problem is that people need work to get salary that can be used to buy food, water, healthcare, shelter and other things one needs to survive. And at this point of capitalism there isn't a lot of room for growth. How many phones I would need to eat per year to support both automatisation and increased employment?
Freeing people from wage slavery is good. Creating opportunities for people to live fulfilling lives free of endless drudgery is good. Working towards a world where no one is forced to justify their existence through labor is good.
In the world as it currently exists, though, taking away people's financial support and forcing them to scrabble for another or face destitution and homelessness accomplishes none of those things. I'm actually kind of insulted that you think I'd think otherwise.
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.
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.
hwbehrens 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.
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?
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).
Sure. 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.
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.
From my days as an undergrad in psychology, I do recall there being a trend of citing even the smallest thing, for the sake of internal consistency within the overall body of knowledge.
“It is true that there are some “technophobes” who—like the Luddites of the Industrial Revolution—explicitly dislike and fear robots (Dekker et al., 2017; McClure, 2018)“
Is that what you are referring to?
They don’t appear to be citing Conniff anywhere at all.
Dekker, F., Salomons, A., & van der Waal, J. (2017). Fear of robots at work:
The role of economic self-interest. Socio-economic Review, 15, 539–562.
https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwx005
McClure, P. K. (2018). “You’re fired,” says the robot: The rise of automation in the workplace, technophobes, and fears of unemployment. Social Science Computer Review, 36(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894 439317698637
edit:
Quoting Conniff: ”They [the Luddites] confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.””
Granted, I haven’t dug into Conniff’s source material, but I do see parallels to the OP article’s argument of there being insecurities about jobs, vis-a-vis the Luddites requiring membership in an apprenticeship guild and parallels to the article’s argument of insecurity leading to maladaptive behavior, vis-a-vis the Luddites characterizations of manufacturers as fraudulent and deceitful and the subsequent property damage.
>“It is true that there are some “technophobes” who—like the Luddites of the Industrial Revolution—explicitly dislike and fear robots (Dekker et al., 2017; McClure, 2018)“
>Is that what you are referring to?
It is. Luddites were no more disliked and feared technology than French anti-Uber taxi drivers hated and feared smartphones or indeed, strikers dislike and fear work itself. Destroying the machines was a tactic not a holy war.
The taxi one is notable because Forbes said that they were modern day luddites. They were ironically quite correct about that even though the protestors did not, as they claimed, actually hate smartphones.
> 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.
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.
“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.
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?
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.
This research is made all the more interesting by their use of real-world data on robot prevalence and comparing that to real-world data on trends in job searches on the internet.
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].
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.
Unlike 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.
What 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.
The cotton industry in England is an horrendous example given that English industrial development on cotton pivoted entirely on the captured and forced to deindustrialize subcontinent of India where it was made so all imports of cotton had to be made from England, therefore allowing a captured market to subsidize English industry in detriment of their own population and competition either in quality or quantity
The cotton-spinning machine would be equivalent to inventing an entire new method for building something. The robots today are 1-to-1 replacements for a specific human task.
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.
> 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)”
If 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.
Child labor doesn’t seem to parallel exactly to this situation - applying this research, at that time, would be more about teaching the adults about how to healthily confront the reality of the situation and to remind them to value their own experience and wisdom, in the face of having to watch a child “take their job”.
Conversely, though, would modern workers embrace child labor in automating some of their tasks and welcome them to the team without hesitation?
Would be interesting to find the IO psychology take on the effectiveness of HR training programs.
Guilt-reduction doesn’t necessarily have to mean checklists of training videos that no one pays attention to.
Contracted talk-therapy is probably helpful for traumatic incidents like workplace shootings and could probably be implemented in a way that it is helpful for people feeling robot insecurities.
edit: [1] found that “results suggest a medium to large effect size for organizational training”, meaning training often works, but there are caveats.
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.
Think 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.
I 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.
> 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.
Or are people turning to opioids and meth in the absence of good job prospects? Do people who like their lives often let drugs destroy them?
On 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.
74 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadhttps://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2021-21106/
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.
Now that those links get opened in browser sandboxes, I assume the concern has diminished.
I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, Robots Can’t Replace Me!
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
I used a throwaway because I know my co-workers read HN!
And what will be the future jobs in a modern warehouse in 10 years ?
I was supposed to feel proud of myself for this.
Problem is not reducing work, problem is that people need work to get salary that can be used to buy food, water, healthcare, shelter and other things one needs to survive. And at this point of capitalism there isn't a lot of room for growth. How many phones I would need to eat per year to support both automatisation and increased employment?
In the world as it currently exists, though, taking away people's financial support and forcing them to scrabble for another or face destitution and homelessness accomplishes none of those things. I'm actually kind of insulted that you think I'd think otherwise.
...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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
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.
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.
edit: See https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
I suspect it's less about the deep research and more about the tribe.
Is that what you are referring to?
They don’t appear to be citing Conniff anywhere at all.
Dekker, F., Salomons, A., & van der Waal, J. (2017). Fear of robots at work: The role of economic self-interest. Socio-economic Review, 15, 539–562. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwx005
McClure, P. K. (2018). “You’re fired,” says the robot: The rise of automation in the workplace, technophobes, and fears of unemployment. Social Science Computer Review, 36(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894 439317698637
edit:
Quoting Conniff: ”They [the Luddites] confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.””
Granted, I haven’t dug into Conniff’s source material, but I do see parallels to the OP article’s argument of there being insecurities about jobs, vis-a-vis the Luddites requiring membership in an apprenticeship guild and parallels to the article’s argument of insecurity leading to maladaptive behavior, vis-a-vis the Luddites characterizations of manufacturers as fraudulent and deceitful and the subsequent property damage.
It is. Luddites were no more disliked and feared technology than French anti-Uber taxi drivers hated and feared smartphones or indeed, strikers dislike and fear work itself. Destroying the machines was a tactic not a holy war.
The taxi one is notable because Forbes said that they were modern day luddites. They were ironically quite correct about that even though the protestors did not, as they claimed, actually hate smartphones.
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.
[1] “White, Educated, Independent, Rich, Democratic”
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)”
Literally about how to confront change at work and how to feel better about yourself.
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.
Child labor doesn’t seem to parallel exactly to this situation - applying this research, at that time, would be more about teaching the adults about how to healthily confront the reality of the situation and to remind them to value their own experience and wisdom, in the face of having to watch a child “take their job”.
Conversely, though, would modern workers embrace child labor in automating some of their tasks and welcome them to the team without hesitation?
Hire an outsourced talk-therapy outfit like Modern Health to add to the HR bundle and they can fend for themselves.
Guilt-reduction doesn’t necessarily have to mean checklists of training videos that no one pays attention to.
Contracted talk-therapy is probably helpful for traumatic incidents like workplace shootings and could probably be implemented in a way that it is helpful for people feeling robot insecurities.
edit: [1] found that “results suggest a medium to large effect size for organizational training”, meaning training often works, but there are caveats.
[1] http://www.psychologie.uni-mannheim.de/cip/Tut/seminare_witt...
- 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.
> 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.
I’m just suggesting that robotics could reduce the frequency of increasing costs being used to raise prices.
Aggregation of marginal savings, etc.
Or are people turning to opioids and meth in the absence of good job prospects? Do people who like their lives often let drugs destroy them?
Funnily enough, you've almost described the plot of the movie Sleep Dealer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer
I recall the old saying; humans are the only computer that can be mass produced with unskilled labour.