The seminar brought together researchers from all over Europe to discuss how automation technologies could shape the future of employment. The conference had room for analysis of both developed and developing countries.

During the conference, I presented the research linking retirement patterns and the task content of jobs. I found that workers in occupations with more routine content are likely to retire sooner and work fewer hours. These differences were statistically significant, though in many cases they were economically small. A possible explanation for this finding is that new technologies allowed the automation of tasks that were more closely linked to retirement decisions, that is monotonous and/or physically demanding tasks, thus enabling workers to remain longer in the labor market. Alternatively, a more negative view would suggest that workers in all occupations had to acquire the skills demanded to work in computer-rich environments. Unfortunately, due to data limitations, the research cannot disentangle between the two explanations.