OSLO, Nov. 4 (Xinhua) -- Norway will soon get a control tower center that will manage air traffic in the country's fifteen small airports from one single place, newspaper Aftenposten reported Saturday.
The technology, developed by the partially state-owned Kongsberg Gruppen, will soon lead to possible significant job cuts.
"If we want to effectivate the public sector, it sometimes means that we use technology instead of people," Prime Minister Erna Solberg told Aftenposten.
Solberg, however, expressed no fear of increased unemployment. "What we can be quite sure of is that there will be no shortage of tasks to be solved. Norway still needs more people in the field of nursing," she said.
"Either we can create new jobs and become one of Europe's most innovative countries over the next ten years, or we will break down when the incomes from oil and gas get even smaller," Solberg was quoted as saying.
The prime minister has these days prepared political platform for the next four governing years, with key words such as reorganization, climate and digitization.
"Companies that want to invest in digitization must have good framework conditions, but also access to people with proper and up-to-date expertise. Here we talk not only about individual measures, but about seeing the larger picture," she said.
Although in this year's state budget, about 400 million kroner (49.2 million U.S. dollars) less has been set aside for new ICT (information and communications technology) and digitization initiatives than last year, the prime minister believes the volume is still high.
"We will increase the funding for new fiber cables coming to Norway and change the property tax to establish green data centers. These are the necessary framework conditions," Solberg said.
