Responding to fears of job loss from automation, Siemens' CEO frames it as a necessary shift. In aging societies with labor shortages, automating manufacturing allows for economic growth while redeploying human workers to essential, non-automatable sectors like healthcare and social services.

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While fears of AI-driven job loss are valid in some industries, healthcare faces a massive and growing supply-demand mismatch. With record shortages of clinicians and unlimited demand, AI is less a job destroyer and more a critical tool to augment existing workers.

Technological advancement creates a paradox: as machines automate more tasks, the economic value of uniquely human and social interaction increases. This structural shift helps explain why recent job growth is so concentrated in sectors like health, education, and hospitality.

Countering job loss fears from robotics, Jensen Huang points to a second-order effect: the massive need for maintenance. A world with a billion robots will necessitate the largest repair and maintenance industry in history, creating a new category of skilled jobs.

The common fear of AI eliminating jobs is misguided. In practice, AI automates specific, often administrative, tasks within a role. This allows human workers to offload minutiae and focus on uniquely human skills like relationship building and strategic thinking, ultimately increasing their leverage and value.

Brendan Foodie predicts that as AI automates digital roles, the displaced workforce will shift to physical world jobs (from robotics data creation to therapy). He argues this is because physical automation progresses much slower than digital automation, which benefits from rapid, self-reinforcing feedback loops.

Using the historical parallel of ATMs, CEO Sim Shabalala argues that AI won't eliminate human roles but will automate routine tasks. This frees humans for higher-order work involving empathy, complex problem-solving, and valuable client interaction.

Jensen Huang uses radiology as an example: AI automated the *task* of reading scans, but this freed up radiologists to focus on their *purpose*: diagnosing disease. This increased productivity and demand, ultimately leading to more jobs, not fewer.

Unlike Western countries where job displacement is a primary concern, Japan's culture embraces automation as a solution to its demographic crisis of an aging and shrinking workforce. This widespread acceptance creates a uniquely favorable market for robotics and AI companies.

Contrary to political rhetoric, Siemens' CEO provides a ground-level view that a widespread return of manufacturing to the US has not yet materialized. He cites labor shortages and policy uncertainty as key drags, despite real investments in specific sectors like pharma and semiconductors.

Many countries, including China, are facing a demographic crisis with falling birth rates and an aging population. This creates an economic imbalance with too few young workers to support the elderly. AI and robotics can fill this gap, effectively becoming the "young workforce" that sustains these economies.

Siemens CEO Argues Full Automation Frees Scarce Labor for Irreplaceable Service Jobs | RiffOn