Mary Ann O'Brien (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I empathise with what Senator Power said about the loss of jobs in Cadbury, but I also recognise that the global giant Mondelez, whose raison d'etreis profitability and the bottom line, is investing €11.7 million in automation.The jobs are going into robotics and automation.

There have been many interesting articles and some research done by Deloitte in Oxford in the past year on the future in terms of the next ten or 20 years. Could we have a debate on the people's adaptation to change and how we should strategise and plan for the future? We may think the Industrial Revolution was a big change in the evolvement of mankind. For me, the Internet was a huge development. None of us could have imagined we would be able to download movies and connect with our friends in Australia through the speed of the Internet, but they say the Internet is nothing compared with what we will see in the next ten to 20 years and what artificial intelligence and robotics will bring about, mainly in the lower paid sector where 35% of the jobs as we know them will disappear forever. Clerical duties, administration, construction, mining, farming and any sort of manufacturing we can think of will disappear. It is about upskilling and re-educating people. Not everyone can work in science and computing. It is about thinking about our future. We should observe also the policy of global giant, Walmart, of raising wages. Perhaps the people there know something the rest of us do not know. They might be able to cast some of their workers aside in the future thanks to robotics.