Europe: Too Few Workers, Too Much Robot Fear? — with Hampus Jakobsson & Skander Garroum

​China ships 90% of the world's humanoids and calls them a demographic fix, Europe calls them a job threat while 570,000 German industrial jobs sit unfilled, and the US calls them a race. This session pulls together deployment data & stories, unit economics, and the current (conflicting) evidence from the US, Germany, and China to ask what actually happens to labor, demand, wages, and the countries still waiting to industrialize.

​At €48.30 an hour for German manufacturing labor, Europe has some of the fastest robot payback math anywhere and the strongest union veto over using it. Whether European industry deploys, delays, or watches China ship 90% of the machines is a capital allocation question being answered in the next years and we will try to answer it.

​The empirical record currently splits by geography: industrial robots cut employment and wages in the US and China, while Germany lost no net jobs because unions and a growing service sector absorbed the shock, at the price of stagnant wages and a falling labor share. Whether general-purpose humanoids repeat the German pattern or produce something without precedent, with knowledge-work AI landing in the same decade is the main question.

​Speakers:

​Hampus Jakobsson — General Partner, Pale Blue Dot.

​Skander Garroum — Investor, PROTOTYPE. Backs early-stage robotics and physical-AI companies; closed Fund III in Jan 2026 citing a 5.6x return track record.