Geo-social advantages and limits
Social interaction is beneficial to all human beings, but they are types of social interaction that cause more harm than good. At some point, some people literally go off to live in the woods, mountains, or modern caves, in order to avoid such risks. This, to me, is the cost of a geo-social threat which is so pervasive that you may not even notice it unless you travel (even if you only travel a few hundred feet to a nearby park or spend a few days in another domestic situation).
Occasionally I run across articles of people who "disconnected from the Internet" or turned off television" for a certain time. As it stands, a lot of the world's population doesn't even have reliable electricity or clean drinking water. So for them, being able to turn on either of those things would imply an improvement in the geographical sense, which has social impacts.
Why, then, are some people loudly calling for depopulation or lower wages for the "working-class"?
The fact that certain geosocial groups can afford to buy water by the expensive bottle, or scorn water in preference to soft drinks, thus inducing diabetes and shortening their own lifespan, suggest to me that we need less of Skynet (a world-destroying malignant network of software running on top of a military-industrial complex), not less people.
Humanity cannot actually be this stupid, the machines just want us to think that we all are. "Thinking makes it so," by simple psycho-cybernetics, if you don't think that humans can be smart, then you'll not only be stupid yourself, but you'll prevent any smart people from exhibiting their intelligence.
If they, those smart humans, do try to do so, Skynet has prescribed a protocol to categorize and exorcise that spark of wit.
In fact, if we want only workers for the factories, then we should just indoctrinate them from birth. That way, within a few generations, the majority will move from wise, happy, loving, to stupid, anxious, and wrathful. Of course, we tend to use the classic name "Asura" for this sytem, rather than the likely trademarked name from the Terminator series.
Television and the Internet didn't make this system, they just helped to make it possible to mass-manufacture adults who keep it in place, and prevent children, especially their own, from changing it, "war and wrath without end".