Robots Are Increasing Mortality Among U.S. Adults
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The automation of U.S. manufacturing-robots replacing people on factory floors-is fueling rising mortality rate among America's working-age adults, according to a new study by researchers at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.
The study, published Feb. 23 in the journalDemography, found evidence of a causal link between automation and increasing mortality, driven largely by increased "deaths of despair," such as suicides and drug overdoses. This is particularly true for males and females aged 45 to 54, according to the study. But researchers also found evidence of increased mortality across multiple age and sex groups from causes as varied as cancer and heart disease.
[...] To understand the role of automation on increased mortality, O'Brien and co-authors Elizabeth F. Blair and Atheendar Venkataramani, both of the University of Pennsylvania, used newly available measures that chart the adoption of automation across U.S. industries and localities between 1993 and 2007. They combined these measures with U.S. death-certificate data over the same time period to estimate the causal effect of automation on the mortality of working age adults at the county level and for specific types of deaths.
According to the study, each new robot per 1,000 workers led to about eight additional deaths per 100,000 males aged 45 to 54 and nearly four additional deaths per 100,000 females in the same age group. The analysis showed that automation caused a substantial increase in suicides among middle-aged men and drug overdose deaths among men of all ages and women aged 20 to 29. Overall, automation could be linked to 12% of the increase in drug overdose mortality among all working-age adults during the study period. The researchers also discovered evidence associating the lost jobs and reduced wages caused by automation with increased homicide, cancer, and cardiovascular disease within specific age-sex groups.
Journal Reference:
O'Brien, Rourke, Bair, Elizabeth F., Venkataramani, Atheendar S.. Death by Robots? Automation and Working-Age Mortality in the United States [open], Demography (DOI: 10.1215/00703370-9774819)
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