Rise of the robots

Visitors examine a robot designed to serve the elderly at an expo in Anhui province, on Aug 14. Guo Chen / Xinhua

Job makers or breakers?

The fact that robots - which don't require air-conditioned offices, paid vacations or frequent salary raises - appear to be ideal employees and few humans can hope to compete with them, naturally raises another question: What if robots perform so well that humans become redundant and unemployment rises?

Industry experts said that such a scenario is improbable. "It's unlikely that there will be a conflict between the installation of robots and employment levels in China in the next five years," Qu Daokui, president of Siasun Robot & Automation Co, said.

Qu said the application of industry robots is limited to only a few fields such as welding, hauling and stacking - repetitive, strenuous manual labor that few people wish to do - so using robots to replace the humans currently engaged in these tasks is unlikely to affect the employment rate.

Statistics released by the International Federation of Robotics shows that the major applications for industrial robots include handling, welding, assembly, dispensing, processing and "clean room" work in dust-free environments.

Although most of the robots are used on automobile production lines (38 percent) and the manufacturing of electronic products (27.6 percent), they are also gradually being adopted by traditionally labor-intensive industries, such as foodstuffs and plastic wares, sectors that have suffered most from the labor shortage in recent years.

"From Germany to South Korea to China, a direct factor in employment has been the economic cycle of a country, not the rising number of robots being installed," Qu said.

Wang Yuechao, director of the Bureau of Major R&D Programs at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that based on current technology, robots are unable to perform complex tasks that are currently undertaken by senior skilled workers.

"A six-joint robot is already the most sophisticated thing that engineers can build using the current available technology, but its flexibility doesn't compare with our hands at all," Wang said. "So the range of jobs in which robots will replace humans is too narrow to threaten overall employment levels."

Moreover, a report by the International Federation of Robotics said a prosperous robotics industry could created 1 million to 2 million jobs between 2017 and 2020.

"Our study proves that robots create jobs," said Gudrun Litzenberger, general secretary of the federation, in a written statement.

Take Germany, for example, where the number of robots per 10,000 workers rose from 146 in 2000 to 261 in 2011, accelerating manufacturing volume and lowering the unemployment rate from 6.9 percent to 6 percent.

"It's a fact that productivity and competitiveness are indispensable for a manufacturing enterprise to be successful in the global market. Robotics and automation are the solution," Litzenberger said.

The way ahead?

The pursuit of economic growth and high employment has been a top priority for governments around the world in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis. As a result, many countries have turned to automation.

In 2011, US President Barack Obama included a National Robotics Initiative as part of the wider Advanced Manufacturing Initiative to boost US efforts in automation and robotics.

In 2012, the European Commission set out a plan for a "revolution" to re-industrialize Europe and boost economic growth, with the goal of increasing the contribution of industry to the EU's total GDP to 20 percent by 2020. Robotics and automation is a significant part of the plan.

In recent years, Japan, South Korea and China have all published plans for the development of robotics.

"Some people ask why developed countries need to develop robots when they barely have any strenuous manual work for the robots to do. The answer is that these countries and regions are trying to solve a different problem to China," said Song Xiaogang, executive director of the China Robot Industry Alliance.

"Smart manufacturing" - the use of advanced technologies, such as robotics and 3-D printers, in tandem with a highly skilled workforce - is the ultimate goal of the re-industrialization trend in these highly developed economies, Song said.

"The intention of smart manufacturing is to use automated technology to greatly shorten the R&D period, and thus increase the competitiveness of the companies," Song said.

Currently, complex testing and quality-control procedures mean that launching a product can be a prolonged process. However, if a computer can precisely simulate the testing and production processes, the development period could be shortened correspondingly.

"A precondition for computers to accurately simulate a real production scenario is that the entire production line must be fully automated, or completely controlled by the computer," Song said. "Developed countries such as the US, Japan and South Korea have accumulated enough data for smart manufacturing after spending many years developing the use of robotics, while China is a beginner at this stage."

Despite being a latecomer, China is not resigned to being a follower: a robotics industry guideline published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in early 2014 spelled out two major objectives for the industry: meeting the huge market demand for low-end robots, and developing high-end robots.

"Low-end robots will be used to replace the missing humans and solve China's labor-shortage problem. In the meantime, it's equally important that we develop our own high-end robots and collect more data from increasingly automated production so we will be able to develop our own smart manufacturing," Song said.