GERMAN WORKERS ARE MORE WORRIED FROM ROBOTS INSTEAD OF IMMIGRANTS AS MOST OF THE JOBS BEING DONE AND IN FUTURE TO BE PERFORMED BY ROBOTS WITH NO NEED OF EITHER WORKERS OR IMMIGRANTS BERLIN, Germany — Right-wing protesters marching against immigration and the so-called Islamicization of Germany may soon face a new foe: the rise of the machines. With low unemployment and a shrinking workforce, the economic engine of Europe continues to endeavor to reinvent itself as a nation of immigrants, even as the demise of the welfare state and fear of multiculturalism have brought tens of thousands of protesters to the streets. But recent reports suggest that robots, not immigrants, may pose the greatest threat to German workers — though the European Union has placed a $4 billion bet that robots will create rather than eliminate jobs. The new wave of automation will hit white-collar workers hardest, according to Jeremy Bowles, a researcher at the Brussels-based Bruegel Institute. “Whats fundamentally different is that [these advances] have the ability to affect a broader set of workers,” Bowles said, comparing the next generation of computerization to the first wave of robots that hit assembly line jobs in the 1980s. The impact of these innovations will vary across Europe, Bowles argues. But in Germany, as in the US, robots may soon take as many as half the existing jobs, according to the Bruegel Institutes analysis of the labor market. These white-collar robots will be more software than hardware, eliminating service industry jobs in the way ATMs and automated telephone systems have already done. But — as the hostile reaction from German unions to other disruptive business models (think Amazon and Uber) has shown — bytes can be more revolutionary than bolts. Why, then, is the European Union investing $4 billion to speed the development of robotics? Automation was the bogeyman of the 1980s, but the automobile industrys experience with it then proved that robots can not only increase productivity but also create jobs, says Uwe Haass, secretary general of the EUs robotics program.
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 03:06:36 +0000
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