Working With Robots Often Carries Mental Strain

Reference: Found here

Picking orders at an enormous warehouse kitted out with robots was less physically demanding than other fulfilment roles that required her to do the heavy lifting, says Jessica, an Amazon worker in her 40s. But she also realised from her very first shift that the job was "frankly, damn boring".

She would spend up to 12 hours standing in one place, selecting items from a bin transported to her by one of dozens of robots whizzing around the floor. Compared with non-automated facilities, the pace of work was faster and often out of her control, which she found stressful. "When you got busy, you would have 20 robots lined up to come to your station," she says.

Jessica left after less than a year. She is now employed at a less automated Amazon distribution centre, where the pace is slower and she can more easily chat with co-workers. It's not perfect — but it is much more enjoyable, she says.

Last year, a University of Groningen study of 20 European countries found that workers in industries with higher levels of robotisation reported significantly less feelings of purpose in their jobs. The effect was particularly high on perceptions of meaningfulness and on autonomy at work.

"When we look at the tasks people report doing after robotisation, it seems that there's an increase in monotonous, repetitive, routine tasks," says Milena Nikolova, lead author of the paper and a professor in the economics of wellbeing.

"Because they standardise and routinise the work process, you as a worker have fewer decisions to make . . . in terms of what tasks you do, the order in which you do them, or often even the speed you do them, because you're dependent on the work pace of the robot."

Separate analysis by the EU agency Eurofound backed this up, finding that workers who interact with robots reported increases in several undesirable working conditions such as increased surveillance and working alone.