Automation and Ageing

Most countries have experienced declining fertility, rising life expectancy, and, consequently, rapid population ageing over the last decades. This has raised concerns about labor shortages. Contemporaneously, a trend toward more automation has gained momentum. This, in turn, has raised concerns about rising technological unemployment. Yet, labor shortages and technological unemployment could hardly materialize at the same time. In this chapter, we discuss the extent to which automation in terms of industrial robots, three-dimensional printers, and algorithms based on machine learning, may be a response to the demographic challenges that we face. As such, population ageing and labor shortages may provide incentives to invent and install new labor-saving technologies in the first place. Theoretical considerations and first empirical evidence are indeed in line with this argument.