Robot wars: China shows off automated doctors, teachers and combat stars - 77 percent of jobs at risk
Robot wars: China shows off automated doctors, teachers
and combat stars
By Julien Girault, Agence France-Presse Aug 19 2018 11:54
AM
BEIJING -- Robots that can diagnose diseases, play
badminton and wow audiences with their musical skills are among the machines
China hopes could revolutionize its economy, with visitors to a Beijing
exhibition offered a glimpse of an automated future.
The popular stars of this year's World Robot Conference,
which ends Sunday, were undoubtedly the small, amateur-made "battle
bots" which smashed, hammered and sawed their way through their opponents
to a cacophony of cheers and shouts from a rapt audience.
"With this robot, I can fully express myself. I love
the sparks," said Huang Hongsong, one of around a dozen Chinese youths
whose creations went head-to-head.
But while the battle bots are designed largely to
entertain onlookers, China is deadly serious about riding the robotic wave with
an eye on its economy.
Cheap manufacturing propelled the populous giant to
become the world's second largest economy in just a few decades.
But the country's population is ageing, leaving it facing
a double whammy of a worker shortage and increased labor costs as it gets
wealthier.
Automated machines offer a possible way out with
President Xi Jinping in 2014 calling for a "robot revolution."
Under the ruling Communist Party's road map for its
industrial future -- dubbed "Made in China 2025" -- state subsidies
are pouring into the sector.
And at the robot show, a vast array of machines
demonstrated how technology may eventually replace human workers.
In one corner, a mechanical arm -- designed to teach
children -- painted an elegant Chinese character while a robotic fish explored
its tank and a bat flapped its mechanical wings overhead.
Delicate balance
By 2020, China is aiming for half of the industrial
robots sold in the country to be made by Chinese companies, up from 27 percent
currently -- with a target of 70 percent by 2025.
"Robots are the jewel in the crown for the
manufacturing industry... a new frontier for our industrial revolution,"
said Xin Guobin, China's vice minister of industry, as he opened the
conference.
But it is a delicate balancing act for Chinese
policy-makers due to the potential for human job losses -- a 2016 World Bank
report said automation could threaten up to 77 percent of jobs in China's
current labour market.
Nonetheless a great robotic leap forward has already been
made. China is now the world's number one market for industrial robots with
some 141,000 units sold last year, accounting for a third of global demand,
according to the International Federation of Robotics, which says demand could
rise an additional 20 percent per year until 2020.
"China has huge opportunities to increase the level
of its industrial automation (and) industrial robotisation," said Karel
Eloot, an expert at consultancy firm McKinsey.
He notes that China still has huge room for growth given
that competitors like Japan and Germany have four times the level of
robotisation in their factories compared to the Asian giant.
Qu Daokui, president of local firm Siasun, which was
showing off a snake-like robot that can operate in narrow passages, said China
needs to increase the quality and sophistication of its robots, particularly in
the field of AI.
"We used to focus on the accuracy, reliability and
speed of robots -- now it's their flexibility, intelligence and adaptability
that makes the difference," he said, adding robots needed to interact and
adapt to their environments and "make independent decisions."
Doctor Bot
Outside China's factories, robots are becoming a more
visible presence, deployed in restaurants and banks and even delivering
parcels.
China's iFlytek, a specialist in speech recognition
systems, presented a new "medical assistant" robot at the Beijing
show which it said was able to help identify up to 150 diseases and ailments --
even passing a national medical qualification exam with a high score.
The robot, which operated in conjunction with a doctor,
asks patients a series of diagnostic questions and can also analyze X-rays.
"It's already being used in hospitals since March
and has made some 4,000 diagnoses," company president Liu Qingfeng said, adding
such a device could be particularly useful for clinics in more remote parts of
China.
Chindex, a subsidiary of the conglomerate Fosun, also
distributes the "Da Vinci System" in China, an American built robot
with arms and high-tech cameras to aid surgeons in the operating theater.
"It transcends the limits of the (human) eye,"
chief operating officer Liu Yu enthused.
But like the diagnostic robot, it still needs a helping
human hand.
"It only helps the doctor, it cannot replace them.
It would not be ethical, the human body is still too complicated," he
said.
© Agence France-Presse
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