Increasing hostility to robots

Surgical robots, robots in automobile production, and robots in caregiving—robots are everywhere. In some areas, the machines are already well-established, in others they are on the rise. The psychologists behind this study believe that we are at the brink of a robotic era.
        
What the researchers say:  More and more robots have found their way into everyday life. But how do people feel about robots? Apparently increasingly uncomfortable, as the research shows in an article in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. According to cross-European data analysis, robots were evaluated more negatively in 2017 than five years before.
        
Skepticism about robots in the workplace was much higher. This may be because the topic of job losses due to robotic systems has been increasingly discussed. However, the use of robots at the workplace is still rated more positively than their use in surgeries or autonomous cars.
        
The researchers analyzed the 2012, 2014 and 2017 Eurobarometer data. This is a representative survey on current topics; their findings are based on a survey of 80,396 people from 27 European countries.
        
In the interviews, the respondents first saw a general description of robots as machines that can assist people with everyday activities, such as cleaning robots. Or as machines that are working in environments which are too dangerous for humans, such as rescue missions. In these situations, the results were still relatively robot-positive.
        
Another picture emerged as soon as respondents were confronted with specific applications, such as surgeries, caretaking robots or self-driving cars. Then they evaluated robots more negatively.
        
It seems that Europeans are relatively positive about robots if they have a more or less theoretical concept in mind. They are increasingly critically when the role of a robot is specified.
        
The study gives some notable insights. It shows that men tend to see robots as positively, while women are more skeptical. Blue-collar workers have more negative attitudes towards robots than people with office jobs. And in countries with a high proportion of older people, the attitudes towards robots are more positive.
        
Taken together, the scientists showed that skepticism towards robots in Europe has grown between 2012 and 2017. This should be a warning sign for politics and business—and a motivation to counteract reasonable fears about our robotic future. Not least, negative attitudes towards new technologies may be a sign that these technologies will not be accepted and will not prevail on the market.
        
So, what? Maybe a new Luddite era is dawning. The Luddites of the early 19th Century were not against machinery per se but rather against poor working conditions, loss of income and powerlessness—only 3% of the UK population had the vote—and smashing machinery was the only form of protest available to them. The situation was very much like today in the US where people of color in Republican-governed states are being deprived of the right to vote and working and middle-class incomes are declining due to increasing use of robots, digitization and the effect of globalization. The increasing distrust of employers, governments and robots in many countries is giving rise to a modern form of “Luddism” exemplified by Trumpism, Brexitism and the neo-Fascist regimes in Hungary, Poland and now Brazil.                               

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