Japan’s robot revolution will impact U.S. jobs

(Photo: Shizuo Kambayashi – AP)

While visiting Japan and interviewing officials on the robotics revolution that is sweeping much of Asia, it became clearer than ever to me that President Donald Trump’s plans to bring back low-skilled manufacturing jobs to America are a political illusion.

Trump should take some time off from the golf course and visit this part of the world, where he would see how fast Japan, China and South Korea are developing their robotics industries. They are replacing massive numbers of workers with ever faster, more efficient and cheaper robots, and the United States will have to do the same to remain competitive.

If Trump goes ahead with his plans to clamp down on U.S. free trade agreements with Mexico and other lower-wage countries in order to bring these jobs back to America, he will be wasting his time. These jobs will never go back to American workers. They will go to robots.

In Japan, which already is one of the world’s top producers of robots, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is carrying out a $1 billion, five-year plan to turn this country into a “robotics superpower.” The plan calls for creation of new industrial and service robots, and for quadrupling the country’s production of robots by 2020.

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