China has bet $20Bn in a humanoid robot revolution and this is arriving at breakneck speed, raising serious concerns about mass unemployment as these sophisticated AI-operated self-learning machines begin replacing human workers across multiple industries – at a rate of over 1,000 units per month set to roll off production lines and an expected 5,000 units per month by the end of this year.
The robot revolution, which science-fiction promised to allow humans to be freed from drudgery, has now arrived but looms as an existential threat to low-skilled livelihoods. These robots are already accompanying the Chinese police as they can record everything occurring and have an encyclopedic knowledge to the law, allowing the police to break up a crown and use the robots to identify every single human who was involved in law-breaking when they arrived, something that no human has the capability of doing. They are also capable of advising a police officer when they overstep the evidential boundaries or the boundaries of law. So, in a pure context, they are advising officers that a particular person has committed no crime and is therefore free to go on their way,
These factories, known as dark factories,
So, something that has been predicted for over three decades and eclipsed by the growth of AI, the Robotic Tipping Point is here where the technology and cost curves have intersected and it is already sending shockwaves through China’s labour market which is not protected by labour and trade unions. The costs have dropped in just 12 months from $100,000 to $35,000, with prices expected to drop again to $15,000 by December,
Some Chinese care homes already have 5:1 robot:human workforces and the humans are expected to be entirely replaced in the next 2 years.
The initial impact will be seen in China’s 120 million manufacturing workers where at least 70% of jobs will be replaced over the next 10- years, but as the robots learn to build themselves, production by 2026 is expected to be easily in excess of 20,000 robots per month and some say 35,000 to 50,000 is possible, particularly with repetitive assembly tasks as the dexterity of the robots matches or exceeds human dexterity and without tiredness induced errors. Most worryingly, these are self-learning robots so they can work alongside humans, learning the new skills and making quality control irrelevant as they don’t make mistakes.
With this new equipment comes an urgent need for robot maintenance and programming specialists as well as robot development engineers and AI ethics specialists, but the AI is so sophisticated that it no longer needs human-robot integration consultants, safety inspectors or robot training specialists because all of these functions are carried out by the robots internally.
What is particularly notable is the healthcare sector, where these robots are rapidly adapting as humanoid assistants, and elder-care facilities are already deploying robots in China to address the care-sector staffing shortages as well as the dramatic shift in the aging demographic.
The Ethics in interesting because China is already considering a “robotax” where companies replace humans with machines and special economic zones where human labour remains protected, although these are increasingly showing themselves to be costly and irrelevant as robots reduce the price of labour to a minimal level. It is predicted that as these robots roll out in the west, so wages in the unskilled sectors will approximate to minimum wage and then minimum wage will come increasingly under pressure to be reduced to the marginal cost of the robots.
The question is, will the human workforce meekly and quietly opt for a
dystopian just-above starvation existence or will they fight as the tipping appoint resulting in human-robot unrest? and will the 200 Million in the EU who are equally at risk go quietly too?
International markets are watching anxiously as China’s robot workforce threatens the workplace because the “complete human replacement” ethos of China is so massively different to the western approach of enhanced integrated assistance and in just the same way that the internet made whole highly-profitable sectors, such as video rental shops, entirely redundant almost overnight, so too these robots threaten to replace the entire low-skilled workforce. International markets are watching anxiously as China’s robot workforce threatens the workplace because the “complete human replacement” ethos of China is so massively different to the western approach of enhanced integrated assistance and in just the same way that the internet made whole highly-profitable sectors, such as video rental shops, entirely redundant almost overnight, so too these robots threaten to replace the entire low-skilled workforce.