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Almost 10% of South Korea's workforce is now composed of robots, as the country leads the world with 1,012 robots per 10,000 employees, topping the global list. (ifr.org)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

And what defines a unit of "workforce"? If a single person is replaced by 3 robots, did one unit of workforce get replaced, or do we now have two more "workers"? What if a robot replaces 3 laborers? Compounded by your question of what counts as a robot.

If a postal worker correcting unreadable addresses was replaced by a better OCR algorithm on a server somewhere, were they replaced by a robot or not? Are servers robots?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Exactly: A single worker can perform a great variety of "jobs" for their employer but a robot typically only does one thing. If you replace a human's job with three robots it would throw these statistics way off.

Not only that but a bunch of robots could be enhancing or expanding a human's productivity. So a single person could be performing the work of five by using the assistance of robots.