Can Robotics, who have high hopes, fill the 22 million labor gap?

Image source @ Visual China

Text | Alter, by | Zhang Hefei, Editor, | Shen Jie

In the two sessions in 2022, "accidents" put Robotics (robots) in the spotlight.

Representatives of the service industry, manufacturing, construction, education, agriculture and animal husbandry and other industries collectively "endorsed" the robot industry, and successively suggested that when the economic, technical and reliable requirements are met, the repetitive labor should be replaced by robots to alleviate the increasing "recruitment difficulties" and "labor shortages" in many industries.

Behind the frequent voices is the result of the continuous construction of the industry in the past two years. According to the research data of IFR and other institutions, the size of China's robot market in 2021 is 83.9 billion yuan, and the average growth rate in the past five years is as high as 18.3%, of which industrial robots are 44.57 billion yuan, service robots are 30.26 billion yuan, and special robots are 9.07 billion yuan.

At the same time, a third party reported that the demand for guiding robots and accompanying robots has great potential, and the annual sales of service robots alone may reach 61.35 billion yuan in 2023, doubling the market in 2021. Three months ago, 15 ministries and commissions led by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also jointly issued the "14th Five-Year Plan" robot industry development plan, with the goal of doubling the density of manufacturing robots by 2025.

The long-term planning of the top-level design, to the orderly growth of market demand, and then to the platform of the industry talkers, does it mean that the robot industry that has been accumulating momentum for many years is accelerating its rise? Before answering this question, we may wish to sort out the industry context behind the "popularity" of robots, whether it is a virtual fire or a real fire.

01 "Natural Migration" of Labor

In 1811, an English textile worker named Ned Ludd led his colleagues to destroy the factory's textile machines, because the emergence of the textile machines had led to their unemployment, and regarded the textile machines as the culprits of all chain reactions. Later, groups that hated new technologies were called "Luddists."

Fast forward to 1959, George Devol and John Ingeberg teamed up to create the world's first industrial robot, but what awaited them was not flowers and applause, but the anger and roar of the "Luddists", because the automated production represented by the robot was considered to be the "culprit" that made workers lose their jobs.

Even after more than 200 years, the "Ledeer" is still active. A typical example is that after the emergence of the fourth wave of artificial intelligence, the argument that artificial intelligence will induce a wave of unemployment has become very popular, and many people have fallen into a deep crisis and anxiety. However, on the other side of the world, a scene contrary to "Luddism" is happening.

While some representatives "ran" for the robot, Zhang Xinghai, chairman of Xiaokang Group, quickly rushed to the hot search for the suggestion of "encouraging young people to deliver less takeaway and enter the factory more".

As a representative from manufacturing enterprises, Zhang Xinghai's proposal has his reason, e-commerce, live broadcasting and other emerging industries have attracted a large number of labor force, so that the hollowing out of industrial workers has become more prominent, and the talent gap in the domestic manufacturing industry has reached 22 million in 2020. According to the ministry of human resources and social security, the talent gap in the manufacturing industry will expand to 30 million people in 2025.

The reason for this is not only the disappearance of the demographic dividend, but also the attitude of young people. Under the hot search topic of "less takeaway and more into the factory", many young people told their views: "Entering the factory is not free, the working hours are still long, the wages are low, who wants to go?" "The intensity of the work is too high, and the duration is also long, generally about 13 hours, and you often stay up all night to work the night shift, and there is too little rest time every month." "The promotion space is too small, even if it is very difficult to endure hardships, it is difficult to go into the office to work, and it is impossible to jump out of the circle of assembly line."

The reason for this phenomenon is not difficult to explain. The problem of the hollowing out of industrial workers is mainly concentrated on the assembly line, and workers mechanically repeat the same action for many years, which is not only easy to lose interest in work, but also makes it difficult for them to learn more skills on the job. Once there is a new type of work with high degree of freedom, large promotion space and good salary, escaping from the assembly line can be said to be an irreversible trend.

If you look at it more macroscopically, Chinese society has achieved a leap from agriculture to industry to service industry in just forty years, and the main theme of the times is not only the change of economic structure, but also the subtle influence on individual life choices, from agriculture to manufacturing to service industry, what is not the "natural migration" of labor, showing the post-80s reluctance to go home to farm, the post-90s unwilling to enter the factory of the era mark.

In addition to changes in employment intentions, the supply side itself is also facing unprecedented challenges. While manufacturing is becoming a service industry vip, the labor gap in the service industry is also increasing. According to the ranking of the 100 occupations with the most shortage of workers in the country in the past three years, the gap in the demand for labor in the service industry such as waiters, marketers, and online delivery workers in the market every quarter is significantly worse than that of the manufacturing industry.

This is probably also the driving factor for this year's deputies and members to focus on robots, rather than guiding young people back to their disliked positions, it is better to ask for dividends from technology and use robots to supplement the employment needs of repetitive labor.

02 Application status of "robots"

Another question to answer is whether robots can handle the task. After all, robots into the factory is not a new topic, in 2013 China is already the world's industrial robot annual new installed capacity of the highest market, auto parts, vehicle manufacturing, household appliances, metal products and other industries robots accounted for a particularly large proportion.

It seems necessary to split the subject into two parts, the first of which scenarios the robots are already landing in. In many people's cognition, the so-called "robot" mostly refers to the huge mechanical arm in the factory, which tends to the high-end assembly line of large manufacturing plants.

The just-concluded Beijing Winter Olympics has provided us with rare new enlightenment: the Beijing Winter Olympics, which focus on the sense of science and technology, have joined the underwater robot relay link in the torch relay link; in some of the competition venues of the Winter Olympics, the inspection robot that integrates public space patrol control, mask detection and early warning, thermal infrared temperature measurement, hand disinfection and other functions has attracted a lot of media attention; in the restaurant of the Winter Olympics, the robot chef is responsible for making burgers, pizzas, cocktails and other dishes. Robot waiters are responsible for preparing and serving meals... The application scenario of service robots continues to sink.

Further refreshing the outside world's perception of "robots" is the "virtual anchor" hidden outside the venue. Gu Ailing's digital twin appeared in the anchor room of a platform, with the host to explain the event, broadcast and virtual interaction around the scene e-commerce.......If the service scope of traditional robots is still limited to the physical space, the application scenarios of virtual robots are more extensive, customer service on e-commerce platforms, anchors broadcast in short videos, sign language translators with higher professional requirements, etc., can become job opportunities for robots.

The second issue is the alternative cost geometry of robots. Although China has become the world's largest consumer of industrial robots for eight consecutive years, it is undeniable that the manufacturing labor force supplemented by robots at this stage is less than 3 million people, and the gap between 22 million is significant.

It has been argued that the most immediate resistance is price. Large and single-function mechanical arms, destined only large manufacturing enterprises can afford to bear, for most small and medium-sized manufacturing industries, the replacement of production line workers with robots is unattainable, and small and medium-sized enterprises are often the hardest hit areas for recruitment.

But the wave of artificial intelligence technology has brought new variables, and small accounts in the details can also allow these companies that can't afford to use robotic arms to find new ways out. Taking the quality inspection process prevalent in the manufacturing industry as an example, under the empowerment of computer vision and deep learning technology, after manually marking the defective photos, and then using the camera to take photos and upload them to the background for image recognition, the accuracy rate generally reached more than 95%. A high-speed camera and a computer can build its simple quality inspection system, which greatly reduces the hard cost of robots entering the factory.

As Gartner predicted in the 2021 Emerging Technology Maturity Curve, artificial intelligence, RPA bots, API integration technologies, ML machine learning, event-driven software, and more are helping companies automate business processes, with more and more manual processes being replaced by rules-driven intelligent systems.

That is to say, "robots" not only solve the thorny problems of manufacturing, but also under the drive of innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence, 5G, big data, and cloud computing, the transformation from traditional formats to intelligence is already the present time of society. The difference is that the phenomenon of hollowing out industrial workers is becoming more and more prominent, and it is necessary to use policy inclination to orderly guide the market to focus on solving the labor shortage in the manufacturing industry.

03 The dividend period of human-robot collaboration

If we stand in the perspective of the evolution of human civilization, we have entered a new critical point, in some necessary social activities, we have to seek the help of "robots", and then enter the era of collaborative division of labor between humans and robots, and the relationship between man and machine is being redefined.

A direct example is the circulation work during the epidemic. At the beginning of the epidemic, community workers in many cities were still adopting the traditional work strategy of either inquiring door by door or calling door to door to communicate, which can be said to be proper "manual labor". Later, many cities have introduced intelligent paging systems, and voice robots assist community workers to complete the work of telephone inquiries and can independently summarize data to the corresponding demand side.

Returning to the context of manufacturing, the simultaneous presence of humans and robots in factories will also be a new format, with robots responsible for repetitive labor and humans responsible for high-value-added work. Perhaps in the understanding of ordinary people, such a scene is still stuck in science fiction movies, but the capital market with a keen sense of smell has already begun to lay out.

According to incomplete statistics, the number of financing in the domestic robot field in 2021 is 168, of which 72 projects with an amount of hundreds of millions of dollars, accounting for 42.86% of the total financing. The coolness and heat of the capital market is often a barometer of the industry's cold and warm, and compared with the "cold winter" of layoffs and salary cuts in the Internet industry, the opportunities of the robot industry can be seen, but we must also be vigilant against two traps hidden under the cloak of high growth.

On the one hand, the popularity of any new technology will not be exponential, the spiral is the norm, and the robotics industry will not be an exception.

It can be corroborated that after entering September 2021, the monthly output of domestic industrial robots began to decline, so that some people predicted that 2021 would be the peak of China's robot production, and it would be difficult to continue to run wild at the same growth rate. Such a conclusion may have a certain degree of subjectivity, but each industry needs to calculate the commercial balance between constraints such as market demand, substitution cost, and user habits, and the robot industry also has a time period of high-speed growth, market digestion, growth stagnation, and demand mining.

On the other hand, As a manufacturing country, China is at a critical juncture to intelligent manufacturing, and it is bound to have enough voice in the robot industry chain.

In reality, the rapid growth and huge demand of the domestic robot industry does not mean that there are no short boards in the industrial chain, such as core components and technologies such as high-end servo motors, RV reducers, control algorithms, etc., which are still limited by foreign supply to some extent. At the two sessions this year, some deputies and members called for "promoting special topic research, creating relevant industrial platforms, and opening up the upstream and downstream bottlenecks of the industrial chain", based on the in-depth thinking of domestic substitution, and more "specialized and specialized" and "single champions" are needed to consolidate the robot industry chain.

To sum up, when human-machine collaboration enters a new inflection point, the robot industry has ushered in an unprecedented dividend. The more in the face of attractive prospects, the more we should follow the "just need theory", avoid the "hormone" feeding of the capital market, and actively explore the value and landing scene of certainty.

As mentioned by the delegates of the two sessions, services, manufacturing, construction, agriculture and animal husbandry, education, pensions, medical care and other industries have the landing needs of robots, as long as these needs are met in time, and new models and new values are steadily tapped, the rise of the robot industry will not be a false proposition.

04 Write at the end

There is reason to believe that when more and more robots enter the workshop, the problem of the hollowing out of industrial workers will eventually be resolved, and the gap of 22 million in the manufacturing industry will eventually be filled.

At the same time, it is also necessary to have a rational understanding that the root cause of the labor shortage lies in the domestic economic structure, which is still at the middle and low end of the global supply chain, accompanied by a large number of labor-intensive work. With the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry, these positions will be replaced by robots step by step, but it is ultimately a gradual process.

During the discussion around the young people's concept of career choice, it will continue for a period of time, but we should respect the market, respect the law, and respect the choice of individuals.