Using Life Satisfaction to Evaluate the Impacts of Industrial Robots

The impacts of technologies like industrial robots are multi-dimensional: economic, social, psychological, and systemic, making the total societal impact difficult to evaluate. Population average life satisfaction provides a solution by democratically weighing the impacts oftechnology on subjective evaluations of life across a whole population. We demonstrate this approach by evaluating industrial robot adoption’s impact on national life satisfaction across the globe over the last 20 years. Controlling for known confounders, we find a modest positive association between industrial robot density in a population and life satisfaction (0.008 points on an 11-point life satisfaction scale for each industrial robot per 10,000 people). This association is strongest in countries with low income, less education, and high levels of income redistribution, and within countries among older and less-educated residents. These results provide promisinginsights on how automation technology affects people, and we provide a roadmap for improving psychological researchers’ well-being impact analysis.