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Letter: Surely automation will lead to fewer jobs

Published 4 November 2020

From Sam Edge, Ringwood, Hampshire, UK

Having worked in automation all my life, I hoped for a little more evidence and less speculation from your article on it (10 October, p 44).

If the interviewed experts think automation doesn’t reduce the number of staff required to produce a given amount of output, can they explain why businesses do it? Assembly-line workers are a lot cheaper than cryptographers or drone operators.

Issue no. 3307 published 7 November 2020

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