Henrik Christensen interview: Robots are not killing jobs | IEEE Spectrum

IEEE Spectrum’s Steven Cherry interviews Henrik Christensen, KUKA Chair of Robotics at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing and Director of the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. Says Christensen:

When I entered the work market in the late ’70s, early ’80s,the secretaries that I worked with were deeply worried about “Am I going to lose my job because the typing pool is going away?” The typing pool did go away, and those jobs were displaced, but if you go and look at the statistics, we have today twice as many administrative professionals as we had in the early ’80s. They do different things now. They arrange meetings, they do travel, they do all of these other things that they didn’t do before.

So in reality, by introducing computers, we’ve created a number of new professions that have led to new jobs. And I see no reason why, going forward, we will not have new paradigm changes that will create new jobs. So I see 3-D printing, I see a number of other things that I think will create new jobs, that will put us in a better position.

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Hallie Siegel robotics editor-at-large

Hallie Siegel robotics editor-at-large