The Robots Are Coming!

by Andres Oppenheimer

  McKinsey did make one mistake, though: this scenario will not take place in 2035. It’s already a reality in many factories in Japan, and across the globe.

  THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT IS SUBSIDIZING ROBOTS

  The labor shortage in Japan due to low birth rates is so pressing—the country’s workforce will drop from 76 million people to 70 million by 2025—that the government is giving subsidies to companies so they can buy robots. Under a $1 billion public-private sector plan launched by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, designed to turn Japan into a robotic superpower, Japan pays large corporations up to 50 percent of the cost of each robot they buy. In the case of smaller businesses, the subsidy is as high as 69 percent.

  “For example, if a small bakery doesn’t have the manpower to mix flour and water, and can’t afford to pay someone to do that work, the government covers up to 69 percent of the cost of a robot,” Atsushi Yasuda, director of the robotic policy office at the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI), told me in an interview in his office. “We’ve already delivered robots to bakeries for mixing their dough and shaping their bread.”

  Some industries, such as health care facilities or homes for senior citizens, are getting higher-than-average government subsidies to buy robots. The government considers that because of the country’s rapidly aging population, that’s an area that needs urgent help. There are already 67,824 Japanese citizens who are a hundred years of age or older, according to official statistics. And that figure is growing every year. Faced with this problem, the government is subsidizing more than five thousand nursing homes so they can buy robots to monitor the elderly, transport them from place to place, and even keep them company.

  According to Takeshi Kobayashi, an official at the Japanese Ministry of Health, there are more than 5.3 million senior citizens in the country who require constant medical attention, and by 2020 there will be a shortage of 250,000 nurses and nursing assistants to take care of them. “We need robots to assist our elderly people,” he told me. “It’s a very hard job, and many nurses can’t be carrying patients around all day because they simply don’t have the strength to do so. These robots won’t replace the nursing staff, but they’ll help the sick and elderly get from place to place, which is a great help.”

  Prime Minister Abe’s plan to turn Japan into a robotic superpower called for quadrupling the country’s robot production by the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, so among other things there should be plenty of multilingual robots—like Nao, the one I met at the entrance to the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi branch in the airport—ready to serve tourists in museums and restaurants. Abe also aims to stage a Robot Olympics that will coincide with the Summer Games, whose motto will be “Robots for Happiness.” According to Japanese officials, the idea is to share the nation’s optimistic view of robots and help make it the largest exporter of robots in the world.

  THE ROBOTIC PET TO KEEP THE ELDERLY COMPANY

  In Tokyo, I visited the Silver Wing nursing home, one of the most robotized homes for the elderly in the nation’s capital. Its building is several decades old and crumbling a bit in places, but it has a wide variety of robots to care for the elderly. When I entered the building, I was asked to remove my shoes in favor of a pair of paper slippers, and wait in a small conference room. A few minutes later I was greeted by Kimiya Ishikawa, the home’s director, along with several of his colleagues, who gave me a tour of the place.

  In one of the first rooms we visited, a woman in her eighties was sitting on her couch watching the television with her eyes fixed on the screen while her hands were caressing something that looked like a pet. But it wasn’t a real animal: rather, it was a hairy little robot that looked like a pet. The small, furry, blue-colored robot looked like a mix between a dog and a seal. Its name was Paro, I was told. When the elderly woman ran her fingers through Paro’s thick fur, the robotic animal looked up and wagged its tail the way a real dog would. Ishikawa told me that Paro was dearly loved by everyone at the nursing home. Many even kissed him goodnight and let him sleep in their beds, he added. I found that a bit hard to believe, but I took him at his word, and we continued on with the tour.

  Next they showed me a room containing several robotic chairs that looked like first-class airline seats that turn into beds. Once these chairs were in a horizontal position and set up against the side of a bed, an elderly person who wasn’t very mobile could still move back and forth from seat to bed without any help. In another room, I saw a “robotic suit” that nurses use to help move the patients around. It was something of a metallic belt with extensions covering the legs that were activated when the nurse began to walk.

  In another room I saw Pepper, the humanoid robot I had seen before at the entrance to the Hamazushi restaurant and at the men’s clothing store at Tokyo’s Akihabara station. There in the nursing home, Pepper played the role of aerobics instructor. The robot was standing in front of a group of residents. When he raised one arm, the class of elderly men and women followed suit. When he turned his body to one side, the humans did as well. When he sang, everybody chimed in. Pepper led these classes several times a day at regularly scheduled times.

  When we finished our tour of the nursing home and were heading back to the conference room to get my coat, I saw something that made me a bit sad. There, sitting in the same position on the same couch, was the same elderly woman I had seen at the start of my tour more than an hour earlier. She was still staring at the television with a lost look in her eyes, caressing her robotic pet. The image was a perfect symbol of the loneliness in which many people spend the last years of their lives in modern societies. I didn’t say a word, but the directors of the nursing home must have known what I was thinking because they immediately came out in Paro’s defense. “Pet therapy is really important: when a person who was at home or in a hospital arrives at a nursing home, they usually feel very lonely and anxious. And for those people suffering from dementia and call for a nurse every five minutes, this robot can help calm them down,” one of the administrators told me.

  CHINA WILL MAKE ROBOTS “UNTIL THERE’S NO MORE PEOPLE IN FACTORIES”

  Much like Japan, China launched a ten-year plan in 2015 called Made in China 2025, aimed at creating what President Xi Jinping called a “robotic revolution.” The goal is to automate Chinese factories, increase their productivity, and thus counter the negative impact of manufacturing plants fleeing the country because of its growing labor costs. The International Federation of Robotics says China is increasing its purchases of industrial robots by 20 percent a year, buying up more units than the twenty-eight nations that make up the European Union combined. According to the federation, by the 2020s, China will be the largest buyer of robots on earth, followed by South Korea, Japan, and the United States.

  “China is by far the biggest robot market in the world regarding annual sales and regarding the operational stock,” federation president Joe Gemma says. The federation anticipates that China’s demand for robots won’t be limited to automotive companies, but will extend to electronics and several other industries. “We will make robots until there’s no more people in factories,” Max Chu, general manager of E-Deodar, a robotics start-up, told Bloomberg News only half-jokingly.

  THE UNMANNED FACTORY IN DONGGUAN CITY

  Recently, official Chinese newspapers proudly announced—in an apparent effort to prove that the Made in China 2025 plan is working—the emergence of the nation’s first “unmanned factories.” The Changying Precision Technology Company, a cell phone manufacturing plant located in the manufacturing city of Dongguan, had laid off 590 of its 650 workers and replaced them with robots, the state-run People’s Daily newspaper reported. And beyond that, the company plans to let the rest of its human workers go in the very near future, the firm announced with a seeming sense of pride. Luo Weiqiang, the company’s general manager, boasted that the sixty human workers remaining at the factory would be reduced to twenty g
oing forward.

  According to the People’s Daily, the factory, located in Guangdong Province, represents “a vision of future manufacturing” in which all the manual work of production and shipping will be handled by computer-controlled robots and self-driving trucks. Changying Precision Technology replaced the laid-off workers with sixty robotic arms on ten production lines that cut and polish the cell phone pieces twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, increasing productivity by 250 percent, the paper reported.

  The robots make “far more and better products than well-trained workers and experts,” the report added. The mere fact that they can work day and night is the equivalent of an entire third shift’s worth of work at no cost to the company. Monthly production capacity increased from 8,000 units per person to 21,000 with the robots. And contrary to what some might think, using robots didn’t reduce the quality of the product. In fact, since robots took over the factory floor, the rate of defective pieces fell from 25 percent to less than 5 percent, the report said.

  “This company is only a microcosm of Dongguan, one of the manufacturing hubs in China,” the article said, adding that the city was planning somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 “robot replace human” programs within the next year. “With the implementation of Made in China 2025 strategy, a growing number of ‘unmanned workshops or factories’ will come out,” the People’s Daily concluded.

  In addition to the exodus of foreign companies due to rising labor costs, the Chinese government is facing a problem previously seen only in industrialized nations: few young people want to work in factory jobs. Plus, China is anticipating a dramatic technological change that will affect all major manufacturing countries: 3-D printers. Nations that until recently imported a large part of their clothes, electronics, and other products from China will now be producing them at home using new technologies like 3-D printers. Today, a manufacturing plant in China churns out hundreds of thousands of identical shirts, which it exports all over the world. But as people are increasingly looking to design their own styles and create their clothing with a 3-D printer at home or at a nearby store, there will be less of a demand for mass-produced shirts imported from China or anywhere else.

  FROM MASS PRODUCTION TO INDIVIDUALIZED PRODUCTION

  As I pointed out in my book Innovate or Die!, 3-D printers will revolutionize the manufacturing industry, even if the excitement around them has somewhat diminished since their first commercial prototypes made a big splash a few years ago. Just as a traditional photocopier can reproduce a piece of paper, 3-D printers can do the same for just about anything, from a button to a shoe to a house. In much the same way as the steam engine led the way for the Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century, and personal computers changed the world in the late twentieth century, 3-D printers may eventually change the way goods are produced. It won’t be long before we move from mass production to individualized production.

  For example, 3-D printers will one day allow each of us to produce our own customized shirts. We will select a design on our computer screens, add or remove any details we want—whether it’s blue stripes, white polka dots, or whatever it may be—and print them out in the comfort of our own homes. And if our personal 3-D printer doesn’t have the right fabric or material we want, we will send it off to a nearby 3-D printing store. As we go forward, it’s the designs that will be exported, not the clothes themselves.

  The 3-D printer was invented in 1986 by Chuck Hull, an introverted engineer whom I interviewed a few years ago, and they began gaining popularity in the early 2000s when NASA started using them to produce replacement parts for damaged equipment during space missions. Soon, 3-D printers were being used by the aerospace industry for the same purpose, to repair planes without having to send them back to the hangar. The shipping industry followed suit and included 3-D printers in the engine rooms of ships so they wouldn’t have to waste time stranded in ports waiting for spare parts. These printers also became increasingly popular in the medical field, where they are used to generate teeth, bones, and even ears that are perfectly tailored to each and every patient. After that, the personalized 3-D printer emerged, allowing people to replace a lost knob from their stovetop or create a new homemade object. But that was just the beginning of something much, much greater.

  ADIDAS IS ALREADY TURNING OUT 3-D PRINTED SHOES

  The sporting-goods giant Adidas has already announced the start of new automated mass-production plants in Germany and the United States that will use 3-D printers to turn out one million pairs of sneakers previously made in China and other Asian nations. Thanks to 3-D printing in factories close to its customers, Adidas will be able to bring products to the market much more quickly, and will always be up-to-date with the latest fashion trends, a company spokesman said. In many cases, the process of bringing a new shoe model to the market took—from the moment it was designed until delivery—between twelve and eighteen months, he added. Now, the time span will be much shorter.

  “This is a milestone not only for us as a company but also for the industry,” said Gerd Manz, Adidas’s head of technology innovation, in announcing a new model of 3-D printed shoes known as the Futurecraft 4D. “We’ve cracked some of the boundaries.” Manz was referring to the fact that thanks to industrial 3-D printers, the production time of a shoe sole has been reduced from 1.5 hours to around 20 minutes. Nike has also recently announced that it has started using these printers, and is producing soles ten times faster than when it was using traditional injection molding.

  And the major sports equipment companies are already offering their online customers the opportunity to choose their own colors, designs, soles, and shapes for their shoes, based on their personal tastes, weight, shape of the foot, and the specific sport for which they’ll be using them. “What you can do is introduce more types of products without a cost penalty,” says Terry Wohlers, head of Wohlers Associates, a U.S. consulting firm specializing in 3-D printing. “With this technology, you can produce one or a few [pairs of shoes] inexpensively.”

  A GADGET INVENTED BY THE MEDIA?

  Despite all the publicity surrounding 3-D printers, some are skeptical that they will ever result in a new Industrial Revolution. Terry Gou, the founder of Foxconn who said that human workers give him headaches, astonished the world again a few years later when he said that 3-D printers are a “gimmick” whose importance has been exaggerated by the media. According to the South China Morning Post, Gou even joked that he was so confident in his belief that if he turned out to be wrong, he would legally change his last name and write it backward: Uog. If he intends to keep his promise, it seems likely that sooner or later Gou will have to rename himself, because everything indicates that 3-D printers—while they may be advancing more slowly than some anticipated—will eventually prevail.

  As we’ve seen with self-driving cars, there is almost always a certain amount of lag time between an invention and its massive commercial use, and 3-D printers are no exception. Aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first flight in 1903, but it was another eleven years before the world witnessed the first commercial flight, and the age of commercial aviation didn’t fully begin until 1926 when federal regulations for pilots became mandatory. Similarly, automobiles didn’t hit the market until long after they were invented. German engineers Nikolaus Otto, Gottlieb Daimler, and Wilhelm Maybach patented the four-cylinder engine in 1870, but mass-produced cars didn’t arrive until almost three decades later, when Henry Ford launched his Model T in 1913. Something similar is most likely happening now with 3-D printers.

  THE RISE OF THE “TECHNICIANS”

  Until recently, workers in manufacturing companies were divided between those performing white-collar jobs in offices and those who had blue-collar jobs on factory floors. While the former were often university graduates or had some other sort of higher education, the latter performed routine mechanical tasks that didn’t require
a college education, and sometimes not even a high school diploma. But this division of labor is changing very rapidly with the emergence of a new group whom we might call the technicians.

  “Today, a third group has emerged in the contemporary manufacturing environment, and is poised to eclipse at least one of the two traditional groups in importance,” says a study by the consulting firm Manpower. It notes that “often called technicians or ‘techs,’ it is the job of this category of workers to program, operate, troubleshoot, and maintain the increasing number of computer- and network-driven manufacturing devices in the contemporary factory.” These technicians are people who require more training than traditional workers because they are in charge of operating the robots, 3-D printers, and computer networks that are doing an increasing amount of work in modern factories, the study adds.

  Todd Teske, president of the engine manufacturer Briggs & Stratton, explains that “now we have lots of robots—as many in a single manufacturing cell as we once had in the whole factory. The skill levels required to work in our plants have gone up substantially. We need people who can program the robots and CNC machining centers, operate them, and fix them.” He points out the fact that despite the increasing demand for labor, companies are finding it difficult to hire technicians because “there is a stigma against going to a tech school vs. getting a four-year college degree. We have misdirected our youth. High schools have become prep schools for college, and not industry. People don’t seem to know that there are good jobs available that pay good wages off technical degrees and certificate programs.”