Deaths from falling out of bed in the US

It is a curious fact, and one that most people find out far too late in life, that as we have become increasingly adept at building machines to replace human labour, we have simultaneously become locked in an escalating arms race with our own beds. Between 2005 and 2021, the number of Americans who fell to their deaths from bed rose in almost perfect synchronisation with the global installation of industrial robots, as though each new automated arm welding car panels in Stuttgart was somehow reaching invisibly across the Atlantic to destabilise American sleep furniture. The correlation coefficient sits at 0.95, which is the kind of number that makes statisticians nervous and philosophers nauseous.

The likely culprit, and this will disappoint you as much as it disappointed me, is simply that both statistics track the same underlying current: a world getting older and richer at the same time. As the US population aged from 2005 onwards—baby boomers shuffling inexorably toward their seventies—deaths from falling out of bed climbed steadily, since older bones break differently and hit the floor with more serious consequences. Meanwhile, the global economy was simultaneously roaring ahead (until 2008, then recovering), and wealthy nations buy robots the way affluent pensioners buy mobility aids: urgently, expensively, and in response to the same demographic squeeze. To put it in scale: we're talking about somewhere between 400 and 800 Americans a year dying this way by 2021, a number that would fill roughly six average tour buses, while industrial robot installations worldwide reached about 385,000 units annually—which is itself only about 500 tour buses of machinery.

So we have discovered, quite by accident, that when countries age and automate simultaneously, their citizens fall out of bed with alarming regularity. This is not, strictly speaking, the fault of the robots, which are mostly occupied with other matters in other continents. But it does suggest that correlation, when it achieves this sort of supernatural precision, is usually just humanity's way of noticing that two completely different problems share a common grandfather. We are all just ageing in a factory.