Industrial robots make people feel worse about jobs and themselves

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can do that

Of course, they are depressed / lack fulfillment/ etc. The more of their job the robot can do, the more likely they are to be shown the door. This problem can be solved by making robot maintenance training available during normal work time.

Everybody panic!

"Specifically, doubling the presence of robots leads to a 0.9 percent decline in work meaningfulness and a 1 percent decline in autonomy."

Well, those results definitely seem meaningful and significant. I'm off to grab the sledgehammer and teach those bloody machines a thing or two!

One way system (to nowhere?)

Well, damn Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard and his 1801 programmable mechanical loom (showcased at Maison du Textile just North of here; ancestor to contemporary programmable computers and robots) -- he automated textile weaving under Napoleon (after the 1789 French Revolution), leading to the "Canut revolts" (first organised worker uprisings of the Industrial Revolution, 1831-1848). We know at least since then that replacing humans with robots can have serious consequences, a point also made clear, cinematographically, particularly for the associated loss of meaning in work, by Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" (eg. the assembly line scene). I think that those could have been referenced in the Nikolova, Cnossen, and Nikolaev paper (for perspective).

"robots make workers feel worse – unless they control the robots"

Right on! And as we transition from relatively dumb robots doing physical stuff to more flexible ones attempting "intellectual" activities (eg. media generation, comms, liberal arts), we can expect the "feeling worse" part of things to intensify, pretty much how we've seen Blake Lemoine and Alex Albert recently believe that LLMs were sentient and self-aware (not to mention Altman's raving lunacy about superintelligence). Current entries of the AI Incident Database clearly illustrate how algorithm-controlled robots can cause serious physical harm to humans. The thymic toll (meaningfulness, autonomy, mood, mental health) studied by Nikolova et al. should definitely be added to that DB IMHO. As more "intellectual" AI gets increasingly disseminated, one can only expect such incidents to increase correspondingly (invest in straitjacket stocks!).

And if you're in the mood ... Decontrol!

Speaking as a

robot wrangler.

Bring them on !

If I program the robot to extract the part from the machine tool and wave it in front of the laser measurer I get 100% of parts measured (and maybe a few right).... with a squishy human I get 100% for the first hour, 90% for the 2nd hour, 50% with the 3rd hour and about 10 for the rest of the day.

Plus all the time the robots wrangling the machine it leaves me time to program up the next robot/drink coffee/plot revenge on the PFY for putting salt in my coffee (I'm old school and used to cigarette butts in my coffee)

But it just brings on a more serious point.

Just what do the workers replaced by the robots do?

So once again philosophers, mathematicians, software developers and electrical engineers working at the nanometer scale in large companies R&D and academia have developed tools. Literature has been published which explains the possibility of decades or centuries of gradual improvement if they are adopted and refined slowly and carefully ensuring for example the sheet metal workers and technical authors whose jobs are automated to some degree get input in the design and that those retained in the industry get a sense of control so the workplace can be more productive and better for workers. As well as ensuring that each stage actually achieves its aims starting out with pilot projects and experiments and only moving on when consensus is reached that there is benefit and no harm is done.

No one reads this stuff too long and too boring. There is one report that says you can do it in 5 years (during the life of your bonus structure if your in the C-suite) and a few companies decided to follow meta to "move fast and break things". Now that's what Wall street expects and everyone knows they never get it wrong, look at the .com bubble, a perfect and restrained motivator of careful and considered economic activity is that market and all the better in a new unregulated space.