Pedestrian traffic fatalities

We have discovered that the more robots we install in our factories, the more pedestrians we seem to be hitting with cars, which suggests either that robots are developing a taste for vehicular homicide through proxy, or that humanity's talent for mistaking correlation for causation has finally achieved a kind of industrial efficiency. Between 2004 and 2022, these two entirely separate categories of fatality and metal moved together with the determination of old dance partners who've forgotten why they started dancing. One might almost think the robots were personally offended by our continued existence on sidewalks.

What's actually happening, of course, is that both trends are passengers on the same economic ship. As manufacturing boomed in the developing world, factories installed more robots while cities grew denser and vehicle traffic increased proportionally—more people moving, more cars moving, more opportunities for tragedy. The correlation is tight enough (0.969, which is to say, almost absurdly tight) that you could fit a sheet of paper between the trend lines, though this has less to do with the robots' malevolent intentions and more to do with the fact that both robot adoption and urban vehicular fatalities are children of the same parent: an expanding global economy that moves faster than our capacity to stay out of its way.

We are pattern-seeking creatures living in a world drowning in data, which means we will find connections between robot arms and car bumpers if we look hard enough, and we will always look hard enough. The robots were never the problem, which somehow makes it worse. The roads, meanwhile, remain indifferent.