A car-fuelling robot , equipped with a camera, fills up a car in Emmeloord, central Netherlands. Photo / Reuters

Robots may help plug 3.5 million job gaps

5:00AM Saturday April 12, 2008

Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in ageing Japan by 2025, helping to avert worker shortages as the country's population shrinks.

Japan faces a 16 per cent slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 while the number of elderly will mushroom, the Government estimates, raising worries about who will do the work in a country unused to, and unwilling to contemplate, large-scale immigration.

The Machine Industry Memorial Foundation said robots could help fill the gaps, ranging from microsized capsules that detect lesions to high-tech vacuum cleaners.

Rather than each robot replacing one person, the foundation said in a report that robots could make time for people to focus on more important things.

Japan could save 2.1 trillion ($26.72 billion) of elderly insurance payments in 2025 by using robots that monitor the health of older people, so they don't have to rely on human nursing care, the foundation said.

The current fertility rate is 1.3 babies per woman, far below the level needed to maintain the population, while 40 per cent of the population will be over 65 by 2055.

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