Abstract:

The present paper aims to analyze the impact of robotization on the labour market, taking the European and Asian workforce markets as reference points for the case study. The pandemic has played an important role in accelerating the process of adopting robots at the global level, mostly in the healthcare and education fields, but also in low-degree digitalization fields as agriculture and workforce in general. The technological advancement has brought with it various high-impact technologies that humans have to adapt to. Robotization represents one of the most significant disruptive technologies of Industry 4.0, having connections with other technologies such as IoT, Artificial intelligence and automation. Robotization brings various types of robots based on artificial intelligence that can perform from the simplest to the most intricate tasks depending on their specialization. In what concerns the labour market, robots have shown a great potential of replacing human employees given to their increased work efficiency, as well as time and cost savings. Robots are programmable machines that are able to perform a task they have been programmed to. Usually, they are utilized in situations that could be possibly dangerous for a human worker, as working underwater, in mines or deep below the surface of the earth. Robots can work together with human workers, this category being collaborative robots or co-bots or they can be semi- or autonomous. One of the most important debate at the time is whether robots will replace the human element at the workplace, forcing human workers either to adapt or to change their field of activity. In this paper we conducted a comparative case study on the impact of robotization on the labour market and analyzed the robots’ degree of adoption and disruption within the workplace in Europe and Asia.

Keywords:

Technology advancement, robotization, Industry 4.0, COVID-19 pandemic, comparative case study.