Can Robotics, Which Has High Expectations, Fill The 22 Million Labor Gap?

Services, manufacturing, construction, education, agriculture and so on across multiple industries for the robot industry on behalf of the collective "endorsement", have been suggested in the economic, technical and reliability meet the requirements, with robots replace the repetitive labor, to alleviate many industry rising "hire difficult" "labor shortage" phenomenon.

Frequent voice behind, is the industry in the past two years to continue to build momentum. According to the research data of IFR and other institutions, the scale of China's robot market in 2021 is 83.9 billion yuan, with an average growth rate of 18.3% in the past five years, including 44.57 billion yuan for industrial robots, 30.26 billion yuan for service robots and 9.07 billion yuan for special robots.

At the same time, a third party report said that guiding robots, accompanying robots and other huge demand potential, the annual sales of service robots alone may reach 61.35 billion yuan in 2023, compared with 2021 market double. Three months ago, 15 ministries, led by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, jointly issued the 14th Five-year Robot Industry Development Plan, which aims to double the density of robots in manufacturing by 2025.

The long-term planning of the top-level design, the orderly growth of market demand, and then the platform of the industry, does it mean that the robot industry, which has been gathering momentum for many years, is accelerating its rise? Before answering this question, we might as well first sort out the industry context behind the "popularity" of robots, whether it is an empty fire or a real fire.

01 "Natural Migration" of Labor Force

In 1811, an English textile worker named Ned Reid led his colleagues in destroying his factory's looms, blaming them for their unemployment and blaming them for all the chain reactions. People who hated new technology came to be known as luddites.

In 1959, George Devore and John Engelberg joined forces to build the world's first industrial robot, but instead of flowers and applause, they will be waiting for "Luddite" anger and roar, because the robot represents the automation of production is considered to be the cause of workers to lose their jobs.

Even after more than 200 years, luddites are still alive and well. A typical example is that after the emergence of the fourth wave of artificial intelligence, the argument that artificial intelligence will induce unemployment wave became noisy, and many people fell into deep crisis and anxiety. But on the other side of the world, the opposite of Luddite is happening.

While some delegates campaigned for the robots, a proposal by Zhang Xinghai, chairman of Xiaokang Group, to "encourage young people to deliver food less and go to factories more" quickly went viral.

As a representative from manufacturing enterprises, Zhang xinghai's proposal has his reason. Emerging industries such as e-commerce and livestreaming attract a large number of labor, so that the hollowing out of industrial workers is becoming more prominent. By 2020, the talent gap in the domestic manufacturing industry has reached 22 million. According to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the manufacturing talent gap will expand to 30 million by 2025.

The reason is not just the disappearance of the demographic dividend, but the attitudes of the young. Under the trending topic of "delivering less food and entering more factories", many young people expressed their opinions: "Entering a factory is not free, the working hours are long, and the salary is low. Who wants to go there?" "The intensity of the work is too high, and the duration is too long, usually around 13 hours, with frequent night shifts and too little rest per month." "There is too little room for advancement. Even if you can work hard, it is difficult to get into the office and jump out of the assembly line."

The reasons for this are not hard to explain. The problem of hollowing out industrial workers is mainly concentrated on the assembly line, where workers are prone to lose interest in their jobs and learn more skills by mechanically repeating the same movements for years on end. Leaving the assembly line is an irreversible trend once new jobs offer freedom, advancement and good pay.

Macro some again, Chinese society in a short span of four years, is to realize the leap from agriculture to industry to services, is not just about theme of the era of the economic structure changes, also affects the individual life choices in osmosis, view from agriculture to manufacturing to service industry, is it not the natural migration of labor, It shows that the post-80s generation is unwilling to go home to farm and the post-90s generation is unwilling to work in factories.

In addition to changes in employment intentions, the supply side itself is facing unprecedented challenges. As manufacturing shifts to the service sector, there is a growing shortage of service workers. According to the statistics of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security over the past three years, the labor demand gap of service industry, such as waiters, marketing staff and online delivery personnel, is more obvious than that of manufacturing industry every quarter.

This is probably the driving force behind this year's focus on robots. Rather than guiding young people back to jobs they don't like, they should pay dividends from technology and use robots to supplement the need for repetitive labor.

02 "Robot" application status quo

Another question that needs to be answered is whether robots are up to the task. After all, the introduction of robots into factories is not a new topic. In 2013, China was already the world's largest market for the annual installation of industrial robots, especially robots in auto parts, vehicle manufacturing, household appliances, metal products and other industries.

It seems necessary to split this topic into two parts. The first question is what scenarios robots are currently landing in. In many people's minds, the term "robot" mostly refers to the giant robotic arms in factories, tending toward the high-end assembly lines of large manufacturing plants.

The Just-concluded Beijing Winter Olympics has provided us with a rare new revelation: focusing on the sense of science and technology, the Beijing Winter Olympics added the link of underwater robot transmission in the torch relay; In some venues of the Winter Olympics, inspection robots that patrol public space, mask detection and early warning, thermal infrared temperature measurement, hand disinfection and other functions have attracted a lot of media attention. In restaurants at the Winter Olympics, robot chefs will make burgers, pizzas, cocktails and other dishes, while robot waiters will prepare and serve the food... The application scenario of service robots continues to sink.

To further refresh the outside world's cognition of "robot", there are "virtual anchors" hidden outside the venue. Gu's digital doppelgant appeared in the anchor room of a platform, cooperating with the host to explain, broadcast and carry out 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 should be more extensive. Customer service on e-commerce platforms, anchors broadcast in short videos, and sign language interpreter with high professional requirements can all become the job opportunities of robots.

The second question is the cost of replacing robots. Although China has been the world's largest consumer of industrial robots for eight years in a row, there is no denying the fact that the manufacturing labor force supplemented by robots at present is less than 3 million, a significant gap from 22 million.

The most immediate headwind, the argument goes, is price. Large and single-function mechanical arms are destined to be affordable only for large manufacturing enterprises. For most small and medium-sized manufacturing industries, it is impossible to replace production line workers with robots, and small and medium-sized enterprises are often the hardest hit areas for recruitment.

But the technological wave of ARTIFICIAL intelligence has brought new variables, and the small accounting of the details can also give those companies that can't afford a robotic arm a new way out. Take the ubiquitous quality inspection process in the manufacturing industry as an example. With the help of computer vision and deep learning technology, manual data labeling of defective photos is performed, and then the camera is used to take photos and upload them to the background for image recognition. The accuracy rate is generally over 95%. A high-speed camera and a computer can set up its simple inspection system, greatly reducing the hard cost of robots entering factories.

As Predicted by Gartner in its emerging Technology Maturity Curve 2021, artificial intelligence, RPA robotics, API integration technology, ML machine learning, event-driven software, etc., are helping enterprises to automate business processes, and more manual processes will be replaced by rule-driven intelligent systems.

In other words, "robots" are not only solving thorny problems in manufacturing. Driven by artificial intelligence, 5G, big data, cloud computing and other innovative technologies, the transformation from traditional business to intelligent has become the present. What is different is that the hollowing out of industrial workers is becoming more and more prominent. It is necessary to guide the market to focus on solving the labor shortage of manufacturing industry in an orderly way with the help of preferential policies.

03 The bonus period of man-machine collaboration

If we stand on 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 human and robot cooperation and division of labor, man-machine relationship is being redefined.

A direct example is the migration effort during the pandemic. In the early days of the epidemic, community workers in many cities were still using the traditional tactics of going door to door and making phone calls. Since then, many cities have introduced intelligent paging systems, in which voice robots help community workers make phone calls and can autonomously collect data to the corresponding demanders.

Back in the context of manufacturing, it will also be a new business to have both humans and robots in factories, with robots responsible for repetitive tasks and humans for high-value-added tasks. In the ordinary people's understanding, such a scene is still in science fiction movies, but the shrewd capital market has already begun to layout.

According to incomplete statistics, the number of domestic robot financing in 2021 was 168, among which 72 projects were worth more than 100 million yuan, accounting for 42.86% of the total financing. The cool and hot capital market is often a barometer of the industry. Compared with the "winter" of layoffs and salary cuts in the Internet industry, the opportunities of the robot industry can be seen, but we should also be aware of the two traps hidden under the cloak of high growth.

On the one hand, the adoption of any new technology will not be exponential, spiraling is the norm, and the robotics industry will be no exception.

It can be proved that after September 2021, the monthly output of domestic industrial robots began to decline, so that it is predicted that 2021 will be the peak of China's robot output, and then it is difficult to continue to run at the same growth rate. Such a conclusion may be subjective, but every industry needs to calculate the business balance among constraints such as market demand, substitution cost and user habits. The robot industry also has a time cycle of rapid growth, market digestion, growth stagnation and demand mining.

On the other hand, China, as a manufacturing power, is at a key point leading to intelligent manufacturing, and is bound to have enough say 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 industrial chain shortcomings, such as high-end servo motors, RV reducer, control algorithm and other core components and technologies, are still limited to foreign supply to some extent. Some representatives and members of the NPC and CPPCC this year called for "promoting special topic research, building relevant industrial platform, break through the upstream and downstream bottleneck of the industrial chain", foothold is the in-depth thinking of domestic replacement, need more "specialized and special new" and "single champion", in order to consolidate the robot industrial chain.

To sum up, when man-machine collaboration has entered a new inflection point, the robot industry has ushered in unprecedented dividends. The more attractive the prospect, the more we should follow the "rigid demand theory", avoid the "hormonal" feeding of the capital market, and actively explore the value of certainty and landing scene.

As the representatives of the TWO sessions mentioned, the service, manufacturing, construction, agriculture and animal husbandry, education, pension, medical and other industries have the needs of robots, as long as these needs are timely met, steadily mining new models and new values, the rise of the robot industry will not be a false proposition.

The 04 is at the end

There is reason to believe that as more robots enter the shop floor, the problem of hollowing out industrial workers will eventually be solved, and the 22m gap in manufacturing will eventually be filled.

At the same time, there should be a rational understanding that the root cause of labor shortage is 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 jobs. With the transformation and upgrading of manufacturing industry, these positions will be replaced by robots step by step, but it is a gradual process after all.

The discussion on young people's career choice will continue for some time, but the market, laws and individual choices should be respected.