Social affairs minister Lodewijk Asscher is happy to embrace robot technology but warns it could create extreme inequality.

The minister was speaking at a congress organised by his ministry on robots and said digital development ‘is at a turning point’ with the ‘far-reaching effects now becoming visible’.

According to Asscher, robot technology offers the Netherlands a great opportunity but schools must teach the talents needed for this ‘second industrialisation’ process.

‘Reading, writing and arithmetic is important,’ the NRC quotes Asscher as saying. ‘But the digital economy will need conceptual thinking, wide recognition of signs and complex communication.’

This is likely to have an adverse effect on jobs for the lower and middle classes, according to the minister, and it is essential that ‘technology goes hand-in-hand with a fair distribution of the resulting wealth’.

The government must not simply accept the fact that much work currently done by people will be done by machines, he said.