In a martial artist’s white silk pyjamas, a man practiced taichi in harmony with a motorized arm at a Beijing exhibition showcasing a vision of robots with Chinese characteristics.
Vehicles with automated gun turrets sat alongside drink-serving karaoke machines at the World Robot Conference, as manufacturers sought new buyers for their jiqiren — “machine people” in Chinese.
The push has support at the highest levels of government.
Photo: AFP
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) issued a letter of congratulations for the conference, and the industry is name-checked in the draft version of the country’s new five-year plan, the policy document that guides national economic development.
The world’s second-largest economy is already the leading market for industrial robots, accounting for one-quarter of global sales, according to the International Federation of Robotics.
However, executives at a conference roundtable said the real market opportunity was in service robots for the homes and offices of the world’s most populous country.
“There are now less than 100,000 robots in Chinese families, not including vacuum cleaners,” Canbot chief executive officer Liu Xuenan (劉雪楠) said.
In the future, said Yu Kai (余凱), the head of Horizon Robotics Inc (地平線機器人科技), China’s automated helpers will do everything from building cars to driving them, predicting that “each person might have 10 robots” — nearly 14 billion potential tin men at current population levels.
Robots have captured China’s imagination. From Transformers to Baymax, the star of Disney’s movie Big Hero 6, Chinese consumers have embraced robot heroes, spending hundreds of millions on related movies and merchandise.
In Chinese cities, businesses try to attract customers with robot waiters, cooks, and concierges. In the countryside, rural Da Vincis cobble together mechanical men from scrapyard junk.
A panel at the conference struggled with the question of how China would deal with the rise of artificially intelligent machines.
However, the transition from the world of fantasy and novelty to a real robot economy could be tricky, with the country’s technology still lagging far behind South Korea and Japan, the undisputed king of the robots.
China should have more realistic expectations for the near future, said Pinpin Zhu (朱頻頻), president of China’s voice-controlled service Xiao I Robot (小 i 机器人), which was involved in a patent dispute with US tech giant Apple linked to its personal digital assistant, Siri.
The country may descend from the peak of high expectations into a “trough of disillusionment,” said Zhu, who believes a smartphone-based “Planet of the Apps” is more likely than a world served by humanoid robots.
Some companies, he said, were focusing on more realistic products, such as “trying to modify the microwave oven into a robot that can fry eggs ... maybe it doesn’t look like a robot, but it has artificial intelligence.”
Skynet, the malicious computer that rains nuclear destruction on the Earth in the Terminator series of movies, remains a far distant prospect.
A badminton-playing robot on display at the conference could barely defend against a small boy’s serve, much less trigger the apocalypse.
And for China to lead the robot revolution, it will have to do more than design machines able to beat children at lawn sports — it will also have to overcome what many experts see as a penchant for mechanistic copying.
The Chinese vision of the future on display in the cavernous exhibition hall had a distinct whiff of the past.
Robots with a more than passing resemblance to mechanical super heroes Iron Man and Optimus Prime danced to the Chinese mega pop hit Little Apple, while booths pushed derivative Segways and Roombas.
Most of the remaining displays were heavy industry mechanical arms, leavened with robotic butlers reminiscent of a 1980s movie.
However, manufacturers are making rapid progress, said Toshio Fukuda, an expert on robotics at Japan’s Nagoya University, adding that imitation was a way-station on the road to innovation.
“In the beginning, you just make a copy. There’s no creativity,” he said, adding that Japan too was once criticized for having a copycat culture. “It’s a process. They have to improve.”
Asked about the possibility of future robots turning against their masters and taking over the world, he laughed.
“Maybe in 30 or 40 years, but I’m not worried. I won’t still be alive,” he said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the