Ever since I can remember, back when I was still driving around factories in my service engineer work clothes, walking onto the production floor would always cause a bit of a stir.

To this day, I still do not know if it was because of the huge amount of tools, suitcases, and random useful stuff we were carrying, or because we were the guys who were supposed to fix that mythical robot. The robot that takes jobs away from decent people.

That story changed over time, and I get the feeling that in factories, robots are no longer seen as villains. But a factory is a completely different world. A closed bubble, far away from the average person who spends life far from the noise of machines and the smell of coolant.

The moment robots started showing up in public spaces, the reaction from people who had never had any contact with this kind of technology sounded exactly like what I used to hear in factories 10 years ago.

“Evil robots are going to take our jobs!”

Today I want to show you that these nasty robots are not really that bad. In fact, they can help us a lot and take the heaviest and most dangerous tasks off our shoulders. We just need to remember one thing. A robot is nothing more than a tool.

You are probably not shaking in fear at the thought of a hammer, a wood saw, a washing machine, or a dishwasher, right?

And a robot is basically just that. A washing machine with legs, or wheels, depending on the robot 🙂

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Colossus during the Notre Dame fire

When I was a kid, I always dreamed of becoming a firefighter. Even now, I have huge respect for firefighters and honestly think they are some of the biggest badasses in the world. Running into a burning building to save another person? That is badass. And they do it without capes or superpowers. I never managed to make that childhood dream come true. My small consolation is that sometimes I get to sit in a fire truck during a local festival ;)

Instead, I became an engineer. And somehow, without really noticing it, that old dream of being a firefighter got at least a tiny chance of coming true. In a way. It would be even more true if I worked for the French company Shark Robotics, the one that delivered the robot Colossus to the French fire service.

In 2019, when the fire broke out at Notre Dame Cathedral, everything was burning and the conditions became too dangerous for firefighters. The temperature reached 900°C. That is hot enough to melt lead, and on top of that, the whole structure was starting to collapse. That was the moment when they decided to send in a tracked robot that had the same cooling power as 15 firefighters. Colossus helped fight the fire in the main nave of the cathedral.

Collosus shows that modern firefighting is also about technology that supports people, even people as badass as firefighters. Did Colossus take a firefighter’s job? I will not even write the answer here ;) I think you already know it.

The police robot that got shot instead of an officer

Fighting fires is not the only danger people face at work. If you work in an office, your biggest enemy might be a moody printer. But if you are a police officer on duty, there is a slightly higher chance you might run into an armed attacker.

In Barnstable, Massachusetts, police used a robot named Roscoe during an operation against an armed man who had already fired at officers earlier. The robot was sent into the building to check what was happening inside and locate the threat. During the operation, it was shot three times. Police later openly said that using the robot reduced the risk to human life.

Another case where saying “robots are taking our jobs” suddenly gets a bit more complicated, right?

Here the robot turned out to be valuable support. It took bullets instead of a police officer.

Spot at the blast furnace in POSCO

The third example I want to talk about today is not as dramatic, but that is exactly the point. Robots do not really like attention or front page headlines. I would even risk saying that 99.99% of robots helping people will never make the news.

These robots help in normal everyday life. Industrial everyday life. And for a human, that life is not always normal or easy.

At the Korean company POSCO, the robot Spot was deployed to inspect areas around a blast furnace. This is an environment with very high temperatures and gas hazards. Before that, these inspection rounds were done by people wearing heavy protective equipment, gas detectors, helmets, gloves, and special safety gear. The robot took over part of that job, collecting data in places where people were exposed to hard conditions and simple physical exhaustion.

You have to admit, it is not as spectacular as fighting a fire in a famous cathedral or taking part in a heroic police action. But life, in 90% of cases, is made up of boring and repetitive things. Just our grey everyday reality. Very different from Instagram reels and Facebook photos, but very, very industrial.

And it is exactly in that everyday reality that you can clearly see what industrial robots are really for.

Industry is boring as hell

In a factory, you rarely get scenes like the Notre Dame fire or a police manhunt. There are no sirens, no cameras, no giant headlines. What you get is everyday life.

And that everyday life is exactly where you see best what industrial robots are really for.

Because the rule is the same.

A robot usually does not take away valuable human work. It does not take away thinking, experience, responsibility, process feel, or the ability to react. What it does take away is the tedious, repetitive, monotonous, and physically tiring part of the job.

That may not look as spectacular as a robot inside a burning cathedral. But from the point of view of a person standing eight hours at a production line, it can be just as important.

You only need to look at three very ordinary examples.

With palletizing, a person spends hours lifting, placing, and stacking heavy products in the exact same way. That is not the kind of job that builds skills. It is the kind of job that wears down your body. When a palletizing robot comes in, it does not take away meaning. It takes away hundreds of identical lifts.

With machine loading and unloading, an operator can spend a whole shift repeating the exact same cycle. Open, put in the part, close, wait, take it out, put it away. A robot is great for this kind of task because it is predictable and repetitive. The human stops being an add on to the machine door and starts watching over the process, the quality, and the exceptions.

With packing, sorting, and pick and place, the robot takes away thousands of identical movements that may look harmless from the outside, but in real life they are tiring, boring, and slowly turn a worker into just another moving part of the mechanism. Then the human can move on to tasks where looking at the bigger picture, reacting, and organizing the process actually matter.

That is not taking work away.

Very often, it is taking away the most monkey-like part of the job.

But let’s say it honestly. Automation can also reduce some jobs

And this is the point where there is no reason to smooth things over.

Yes, automation and robotization can change the structure of employment. They can reduce the need for some positions, especially where a process used to be very manual and based on simple, repetitive tasks. An automated line does not need as many people for manual packing, simple supervision, or feeding products into the process as a line based mostly on manual work.

Still, the phrase “they take jobs away” is too simple and too negative. More often, technology shifts demand from one role to another. What usually happens is not pure removal, but change.

The problem is that this change does not happen evenly, and it does not happen overnight. It comes in waves.

First, a simple part of the process gets automated. Then fewer people are needed for one specific activity. After that, quality, maintenance, changeovers, settings, process data, and coordination become more important. Only later does the company try to place people into new roles.

And that is exactly why reskilling, training, and competence development matter so much.

But there is also a bitter truth here. Not everyone will find their place in the new setup. Not everyone has the conditions, the options, or the natural ability to move one level higher. Not everyone will become a robot programmer, a maintenance technician, or a process specialist. That romantic story that every technological change automatically opens new doors for everyone is simply not honest.

At the same time, it would be just as dishonest to pretend that companies today are sitting on a huge pile of extra workers they cannot wait to fire.

Because at the same time, we have a real problem. Not enough people to work

This is the second part of the puzzle, and without it the whole discussion becomes flat.

For years, Europe has been struggling with labour shortages and skills shortages. And you can see that in industry very clearly.

That is also why my own observation matters so much here.

In 10 years of work and after hundreds of factory visits, I only once came across a situation where people were directly laid off because of automation. Once. Just once.

In all the other cases, companies simply could not afford to let trained workers go. They still needed them, just in a different part of the process. Somewhere else. On a different task. In a different role.

Of course, that does not mean the risk does not exist. It does. But in industrial reality, I have seen work being shifted much more often than brutally cut out.

So the problem is not really the robots themselves

When we see a robot at a fire, in a danger zone, or near a blast furnace, we naturally understand why it makes sense. In those cases it is obvious. There is danger. There is a place where it is better to send a machine first instead of a human.

In industry, it is harder to see sometimes, because the danger is not always dramatic. Sometimes there is no fire, no gun, no noise. There is only repetition, overload, boredom, small injuries, and eight hours of the exact same action.

But that is also a cost. That is also something a human should not have to carry forever just because “it has always been done this way”.

That is why when I hear people say that robots are taking jobs away from humans, I more and more often have a different question in my head.

What kind of work exactly?

Because if they are taking away entering a fire, entering a building with an armed attacker, walking around a blast furnace, lifting boxes for a whole shift, or doing thousands of identical movements every day, then maybe it is worth looking at this a bit more calmly.

Maybe they are not taking work away from us.

Maybe very often they are simply taking away the things we ourselves stopped wanting to do a long time ago.

And where they really do change the structure of jobs, the answer should not be denial. It should be smart preparation of people for change.

Ending

We are always afraid of technology we do not really know yet. That is just human nature.

First comes fear. Then distance. Then stories about danger. Only later comes the understanding that a new tool does not always arrive to remove the human. Sometimes it comes to make life easier. Sometimes to protect us. Sometimes to take away the worst part of the job.

And that is exactly how we should talk about robots today.

Not in a naive way. Not like propaganda. Not in that “everyone will benefit equally” mode.

Just honestly.

Yes, some roles will change. Yes, some people will have to learn something new. Yes, this change will not be easy for everyone.

But it is just as true that we live in a world with labour shortages, rising demands, and processes that more and more often cannot be maintained by human hands alone.

So the most honest question today is not:

Will robots take our jobs?

It is more like this:

What kind of work is worth giving to robots, so that humans can do more of what they are actually best at?

 Cheers, Jacek!