"Digital automation has pervaded many areas of our daily activities with serious repercussions on social, economic and political systems. Automation's ever-enhancing capability to transform the human lives has spawned a wide body of scholarly research with inputs from social and economic sciences, engineering and technology. This paper 1 provides a brief overview of the main arguments put forward by the researchers particularly in labour economics on the subject of digital automation with a special focus on Germany. Such debates revolve around the impact of automation on the number of jobs performed by human labour and restructuring of labour markets under the influence of automation. The overview starts with a short discussion of the meaning of digital automation. It then outlines the debates on how technology distributes the work between humans and machines from the viewpoints of skill biased technological change and routine biased technological change research. This is followed by a summary of the way digital technologies has been restructuring the world of work. The overview concludes by pointing to research gaps that are particularly relevant in the German context. It emphasizes that a new research agenda should incorporate the role of existing education and training regimes (VET) in particular in light of employment polarization and the shrinking employment segment of jobs with mid-level pay and skills. Moreover, there is a lack of research that considers the insights of industrial sociology with regard to the renegotiation of work organization in the process of automation. In particular the role institutional factors such as workers' representatives by trade unions or works councils has largely been neglected by studies in labour economics. Finally, there should be more attention paid to the differentiated effects of automation on specific socioeconomic groups such as women and men but also between different generations."

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