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Robots Ride To the Rescue Where Workers Can't Be Found (nytimes.com)

Fast-growing economies in Eastern Europe have led to severe labor shortages, so companies are calling in the machines [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: In many major economies, companies are experimenting with replacing factory workers, truck drivers and even lawyers with artificial intelligence, raising the specter of a mass displacement of jobs. But in Eastern Europe, robots are being enlisted as the solution for a shortage of workers. Often they are helping to create new types of jobs as businesses in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland try to stay agile and competitive. Growth in these countries, which became low-cost manufacturing hubs for Europe after the fall of Communism, has averaged 5 percent in recent years, buoyed by the global recovery.

Few are riding higher than the Czech Republic, where plants roll out cars for the likes of Toyota and consumer electronics for Dell, while smaller companies produce specialty goods to sell around the world. A roaring economy has slashed the jobless rate to just 2.4 percent, the lowest in the European Union. The dearth of manpower, however, has limited the ability of Czech companies to expand. Nearly a third of them have started to turn away orders, according to the Czech Confederation of Industry, a trade group.

2 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Headlines, man... by TimMD909 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is this is an article about workers who are lost? No. Is this an article about robots transporting people? No. Is this an article about search and rescue? No.

  2. Re:workers are begging to join by hackertourist · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Those male refugees left their families behind in a refugee camp (the safest place they could find not too far away from the hellhole they fled from). Then they undertook the dangerous journey to their final destination alone, planning to immigrate, get legally and financially set up and then pay for their families to travel safely and legally to rejoin them.

    You've fallen for right-wing rhetoric with no basis in truth.