From A 'demographic Dividend' To A 'robot Dividend'

The country's population shrank in 2022, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Jan 17. By the end of 2022, China's population (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan residents and foreign nationals living in 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government) was 1.411175 billion, with 9.56 million births. The population by the end of 2022 was 850,000 fewer than that by the end of 2021.

Since 1962, the natural growth rate of our population showed negative growth for the first time. Many population experts say that China's population decline is a long-term trend and the demographic dividend is slowly disappearing.

Two days later, on January 19, 17 departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the Implementation Plan of "Robot +" Application Action. This plan is an important work deployment according to the "14th Five-Year" Robot Industry Development Plan formulated by 15 departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology at the end of last year.

Few people have interpreted these two things together, but what we are saying is that they are closely related. The vanishing "demographic dividend" will be replaced by a "robot dividend", and we will enter an unprecedented age of robots.

Find ways to offset the demographic dividend decline

An economy that can achieve extraordinary growth must be supported by some economic dividend.

The so-called economic dividend refers to the development advantages of a country or region at a specific stage of development, as well as the benefits brought by utilizing the development advantages. Since the reform and opening up, the sustained development of Chinese economy has been mainly brought into play by two bonuses: one is reform; First, the demographic dividend. Reform is the self-improvement of the socialist system. The country has brought huge benefits to social development and progress through institutional reform and innovation. Demographic dividend refers to a period of rapid decline in the fertility rate, relatively light support burden of children and the elderly, the proportion of working-age population (15 ~ 64 years old) in the total population increases, forming a relatively rich labor resources, is very favorable to economic development of the golden period.

According to the research results of many demographic experts, since the late 1970s, China's population has a large proportion of working-age population and a low dependency ratio, forming a window of opportunity for population. In more than 30 years from 1979 to 2013, the proportion of working-age population in the total population rose from 58% to the highest of 73.75% in 2010. In 1979, the working-age population was 570 million, while in 2013, it peaked at 1.006 billion. The demographic window of opportunity does not necessarily translate into a demographic dividend. Very fortunately, the window of population opportunity overlaps with the reform and opening up, which makes the window of population opportunity rapidly transform into demographic dividend, and realize the rapid development of economic society.

In the first 10 years of the 21st century, the window of opportunity of Chinese population narrowed and the demographic dividend was gradually reduced. According to the data from the seventh census, the size of the working-age population in China slowly decreased after reaching a peak of 1.006 billion in 2013, and dropped to 968 million in 2020. The working-age population as a share of the total population fell to 68.55% in 2020 after peaking at 74.53% in 2010. At this time, the total population of China was still increasing, but the proportion of working-age population was declining, especially the cheap labor force from rural to urban areas was gradually decreasing. China's urbanization rate reached 56.1% in 2015, about 1.2 percentage points higher than the world average, and the pace of urbanization slowed down. From the perspective of economics, the so-called "Lewis turning point" occurs when the surplus rural labor force is transferred to non-agricultural industries until it is exhausted, that is, the turning point from surplus to shortage of labor force, and the channel of rising labor cost is opened.

China's population is already on a cycle of decline. This is a process experienced by many developed countries. The decline of population eventually means the disappearance of demographic dividend, which will bring many problems to economic and social development. First of all, the shortage of human reserve resources will cause the continuous rise of labor costs. Second, the proportion of young people in the total population who are in the prime of value creation will decline, and the dependency ratio will gradually rise. The dependency ratio refers to the ratio of the total number of people aged 0 to 14 to the total number of people aged 65 and over to the total number of people aged 15 to 64. Since the reform and opening up, the dependency ratio has dropped from 62.6% in 1982 to 34.2% in 2010 and 45.9% in 2020. It will continue to rise. The third is the deepening of the aging society, which puts forward more extensive requirements for the public service of social aging. Of course, the disappearance of old economic dividends is a normal phenomenon of social development. The key is whether new dividends can be found after the disappearance of old dividends, which requires timely transformation of economic and social development.

Develop the robot industry to form new dividends

China is the world's largest manufacturing nation, supported by a large pool of skilled workers. From 2012 to 2015, due to the slow transfer of rural surplus labor, there was once a "labor shortage" in the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta. Therefore, the government put forward the idea of "machine replacement" and formulated a series of policies to promote the development of the robot industry. Since 2013, China has become the world's largest industrial robot application market. Robot sales in China reached 57,000 units in 2014, up 56% year on year, accounting for a quarter of the global market. In March 2016, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other three departments issued the Robot Industry Development Plan (2016-2020). At the end of last year, the "14th Five-Year" robot Industry Development Plan was compiled.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will take the lead and work out the development plan of robot industry in conjunction with other relevant departments. The main foothold is to promote the development of Chinese robot industry. The 14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Robot Industry clearly aims to promote the high-quality development of robot industry from multiple dimensions, such as technological breakthrough, foundation improvement, supply optimization, application expansion and ecological creation. These planning and work deployment have indeed promoted the rise of the robot industry in our country. From 2016 to 2020, the compound annual growth rate of China's robot industry is about 15%, with the output of industrial robots increasing from 72,000 to 212,000, an average annual growth rate of 31%. In 2020, China's manufacturing robot density reached 246 robots per 10,000 people, nearly twice the global average.

Today, our main point is that the rise of robotics applications and industries is not only related to the development of new industries, but also has a deeper significance for economic and social transformation. Robot, as the name suggests, has both the attributes of a machine and some kind of human or biological attributes, is essentially a humanoid or alien intelligent machine. The widespread use of robots, first of all to replace human resources in many scenarios, can minimize the shortage of labor in the process of population decline. Secondly, as an intelligent machine, it can greatly improve work efficiency, enhance the benefits of economic activities and improve social welfare. The third is that more humanoid robots will enter the home in the future, providing more practical help for the education of children and the companionship and care of the elderly. To sum up, the wide application of robots can make up for the shortage of young labor in the specific period of population decline in China, and play to the advantages of robots, bring more benefits to the economic and social development, so as to form a new robot dividend.

Welcome the robot era with open arms

There was an ancient dream of making clever robots. According to Lietzi · Tang Wen of the Warring States Period, a craftsman named Yan Shi presented to King Mu of Zhou an "entertainer of song and dance performances" -- an initiator. The advocator bowed his head to sing, and raised his hand to dance. Yanshi open the initiative, the original is made of leather, wood, resin and paint. King Mu of Zhou sighed, "Can man's skill be equal to that of the creator?" In the Romance of The Three Kingdoms, Zhuge Liang's wooden ox and horse belong to the "robot" of transportation. All these show the rich imagination and wisdom of ancient Chinese.

After the Industrial Revolution, the machine era began, and various machines came out. Automatic, semi-automatic robotic arms on modern factory lines became the prototype of robots. After the birth of computer, artificial intelligence combined with mechanical electronics and sensors, gave birth to robots that can adapt to a variety of scenarios and undertake complex tasks, and the development of robots really gradually into the best. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in our COUNTRY starts from industrial development planning, AND divides the robot industry into three BIG CATEGORIES, NAMELY industrial robot, service robot, special robot. It can be said that these three categories of robots cover the vast majority of task scenarios. However, it can be divided into humanoid robots and non-humanoid robots by distinguishing the form of robots. Humanoid robot returns to the true nature of machine "man", and has a broader development prospect in the future!

Humanoid robots are robots that look and act like humans. Compared with industrial robots and collaborative robots, humanoid robots have advantages in human-computer emotional interaction and adaptability to unstructured scenarios. Some experts believe that the development of humanoid robots can be divided into three stages: (1) The exploration stage from 1928 to 1973 mainly focused on the mechanical structure and behavioral drive of humanoid robots, which did not have the perception and decision-making functions. (2) The period from 1973 to 2013 is the system perception stage, which has made great breakthroughs in the aspects of "vision", "hearing" and "touch". (3) The period from 2013 to now is the autonomous decision-making stage. Humanoid robots have stronger autonomous learning and decision-making abilities. Lei introduced Xiaomi's humanoid robot, Xiaomi Tie Da, at the company's autumn product launch event on Aug 16 last year. A little over a month later, Musk unveiled Tesla's first humanoid robot, Optimus Prime, at the Tesla Artificial Intelligence Day. Remember the date in 2026, and you'll have your own Optimus Prime droid. Humanoid robots are starting to come into the public eye.

Humanoid robot technology embodies the essence of contemporary technology and manufacturing, mainly involving controller, servo motor, reducer, high energy density battery, speech recognition, positioning and navigation, composite materials and other high-end manufacturing technology, is the crown jewel of contemporary manufacturing technology; And the core technology of any robot is artificial intelligence. That's because robots are essentially AI, "systems and machines that iterate or improve themselves based on the information they gather." It can be said that, to some extent, the development of artificial intelligence technology determines the growth of various robots at present. Over the years, artificial intelligence has made breakthroughs in many directions. Last November, 0 penai company developed a general chatGPT fire bot program, let's see the artificial intelligence in human-computer interaction aspects show a new 龧 light. The dawn of science and technology forward, leading the robot strides towards us.

We have reason to believe that an age of robots is coming. Under the shape of new science and technology, humanoid robots can be closer to human beings from appearance to behavior, show good human-computer interaction, show more robot skills, and participate in the social division of labor with human, by thousands of families invited into the family, robot will eventually change human social life!