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A revolution, said Mao Zedong, just isn’t dinner. That could also be so. But that doesn’t mean that there might be no food within the revolution.
This week in Tokyo, artificial intelligence and robots presented their plans to take over before an enormous crowd of holiday makers from Asia's food industry.
The technological advances of recent years, claim the robots' human supporters, have given them something they’ve at all times lacked: intelligent, soft hands with spatial awareness. These working hands are needed first for the boiled spaghetti and steamed dumplings, then for the fried chicken, the delicate cookies and the onigiri rice balls with grilled salmon.
The robots' ambitions were unimaginable to cover. This was no time for a lenient salute to the looming layoff of human staff, or a nod toward the necessity for moderation. Rather than threatening cunning or attrition, the ranks of food-processing automatons—including Foodly, Delibot, and the Nantsune Scorpion—offer a blunt manifesto of substitute.
Those who bought our machines today, said trade show salespeople from a whole bunch of manufacturers, could do without humans tomorrow. Brochures touting the robots' increasingly sensible capabilities depicted humans as gray silhouettes on the long run assembly line – the ghosts of those a possible buyer would now not should employ.
And that's exactly why the visitors to the Fooma Japan exhibition, mainly from Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan (not coincidentally essentially the most demographically disparate countries within the region), had come. The food industry operates on the thinnest profit margins and is usually a weak point in productivity gains. Companies want AI and robots: unlike in other sectors, the talk here is simply about production and price. Japan's shrinking population and years of stagnation have given the country a fearlessness (future historians might say recklessness) in embracing AI-powered automation; other countries know they may should do the identical very soon.
In this context, the Fooma Expo represents a series of revolutions – some desirable, some vital. The most blatant of those is productivity: the newest government figures for Japan's food production industry show that it’s substantially lower than in the overall manufacturing industry. A 2022 Bank of Japan papers lamented the persistently low productivity growth and the associated slowness with which resources are inclined to shift from low-productivity to high-productivity sectors.
Improvements will come, the report says, from two shifts in resource allocation and, crucially, a more liquid labor market where staff seek the talents needed for the more productive sectors. Japan, in other words, needs AI-powered robots to pack lunch boxes and stuff rice balls so its dwindling human capital stock can tackle other work.
The revolution most evident in Tokyo this week is technological and a piece in progress, veterans of those events said. This industry has at all times embraced automation, but additionally struggles with gaps in its processes – akin to quality control – where only humans currently fit. Japan, whose convenience stores and supermarkets must churn out an enormous amount of ready-made food day by day, is especially aware of this.
Quite a few recent works on Robotic food handling illustrates the issue: When food is porous, slippery, sticky or easily breakable, human hands are sometimes the one option for parts of the method.
But today, through the mix of more sophisticated sensors, AI tools to cope with overlapping, uneven materials, and more delicate gripping tools, that's now not the case: Robotic hands can fastidiously grab a precisely measured portion of pasta from a bowl or select three pieces of fried chicken from a vat of hundreds. They may fit a bit slower than humans, vendors agree, but they never sleep. Fujiseiki was certainly one of several firms that might now sell fully automated, start-to-finish processes for the normally labor-intensive assembly of bento lunch boxes, onigiri, and other packaged ready meals.
But what was most striking about this latest generation of soft-handed robots was the way in which their operators claimed they might replace humans: on a small scale at the extent of individual firms, but within the tens of hundreds across a whole industry. Whether it was the sales staff explaining the price savings on offer or the brochures showing the phantom staff being replaced, the revolutionaries will take over two or three jobs at a time – or free people, depending in your standpoint.
