[Some
in China are building a future that isn’t quite ready. Still, the exuberance
may be a good thing, as useful products find their place and bad ones
disappear.]
By Paul Mozur
 |
|
This
is about as far as the nonhuman waiters can go at the Robot Magic Restaurant
in
Shanghai. After diners take photos and videos, regular waiters step in to
serve
the food. Credit Yuyang Liu for The New York Times
|
SHANGHAI
— The mind-reading headsets
won’t read minds. The fire-detecting machine has been declared a safety hazard.
The robot waiter can’t be trusted with the soup.
China is ready for the future, even if the
future hasn’t quite arrived.
China has become a global technological force
in just a few years. It is shaping the future of the internet. Its technology
ambitions helped prompt the Trump administration to start a trade war. Hundreds
of millions of people in China now use smartphones to shop online, pay their
bills and invest their money, sometimes in ways more advanced than in the
United States.
That has led many people in China to embrace
technology full tilt, no matter how questionable. Robots wait on restaurant
diners. Artificial intelligence marks up schoolwork. Facial recognition
technology helps dole out everything from Kentucky Fried Chicken orders to
toilet paper. China is in a competition with itself for the world record for
dancing robots.
That embrace of tech for tech’s sake — and
the sometimes dubious results it leads to — were on display at the Global
Intelligence and World Business Summit, held last month in Shanghai, which
several luminaries in Chinese tech and academia were supposed to kick off with
their minds.
Donning black headbands that looked like
implements of electroshock therapy, the seven men and two women onstage were
told to envision themselves pressing a button. The headbands would transmit
their brain activity to the robotic hand sharing the stage, which would then
push a button to officially start the conference.
A countdown began. A camera put the robotic
hand onto a huge screen above the stage. The people onstage seemed to
concentrate. And then, nothing happened. The hand remained motionless. The
camera panned away.
A spokesman for Yiou, the tech consultant
that hosted the event, declined to comment except for: 😂😂.
All of this embarrasses some people in the
Chinese tech scene. They warn that the excess exuberance is one sign of a
venture capital bubble, which may be about to burst. Rather than show China’s
newfound tech might, they argue, spectacles like dancing robots and ineffective
mind readers cover up the country’s lack of progress in other areas.
Those deficiencies were made clear in April
when the United States forbade American companies to sell chips, software and
other technology to ZTE, a Chinese telecom company. ZTE was found to have
violated American sanctions by selling products to Iran and North Korea. The
ban brought the company to a virtual standstill.
Chinese people shouldn’t lose touch with reality,
warned Liu Yadong, chief editor of the state-run Science and Technology Daily.
In a recent speech, he said that China still lagged the United States in tech,
and that those who argued otherwise ran the risk of “tricking leaders, fooling
the public and even fooling themselves.”
China isn’t the first country to get ahead of
itself in tech. Japan at the height of its economic powers had robots that
prepared sushi. More recently, Silicon Valley has gone gaga over more than a
few pointless products, like Yo — the app that said only “yo” — and Juicero, the $700 juicer. Ultimately
the exuberance could be a good thing for China, as useful products find their
place and bad ones disappear when the boom matures.
And China has come a long way. What was an
agrarian backwater 40 years ago is home to the world’s single largest group of
internet users and some of its most valuable internet companies.
Now it’s pushing ahead into emerging tech. In
2017, Chinese start-ups took up nearly half the dollars raised globally for
artificial intelligence, according to CB Insights, a research firm that follows
venture capital. By 2020, China is expected to account for more than 30 percent
of worldwide spending on robotics, according to technology research firm IDC.
Many in China see the country’s supremacy
over the United States in tech as inevitable, and they are eager to get to that
day.
“Chinese are much more willing to try
something new just because it looks cool,” said Andy Tian, chief executive of
Beijing-based Asia Innovations Group, which runs mobile apps. “It sounds
superficial. It is superficial. But that’s the driver of progress in a lot of
cases.”
The E-Patrol Robotic Sheriff could fill that
bill. It is among several security robots that have shown up at train stations
and airports around China in recent months. The E-Patrol Robotic Sheriff —
which looks like the camera lens from the HAL 9000 computer in “2001: A Space
Odyssey” mounted on a white trash tub — patrols the high-speed rail station in
the central Chinese city Zhengzhou, tasked with using facial recognition to
find and follow suspicious characters, as well as to measure air quality and detect
fires.
During a winter visit to the station, the
robot was nowhere to be found. First, it had missed a fire, officials said. It
also had a tendency to collect so many selfie-seeking fans that it became a
safety hazard. A spokesman for the train station said it was getting an upgrade
and would eventually return.
Robots in particular have captured the
Chinese imagination. A Beijing television station this year made a
robot-dominated version of the country’s annual Lunar New Year television
special. Robots and humans performed tai chi and comedy routines, and sang and
danced.
Companies and local officials often have good
reason to show off their splashiest and silliest wares. China frequently takes
a top-down approach to technology, with local governments rushing to follow
plans that come down from on high. Gizmos with a bit of futuristic verve are
often the best symbols of progress.
Dancing robots, for example, became something of a fixture of company and
government presentations last year. “They were everywhere,” said David Li, a
co-founder of Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, a government-supported platform
that supports small hardware start-ups in Shenzhen. He estimated that he had seen 10 dancing robot
shows in a single week.
Alibaba, the Chinese online shopping giant,
has also gotten into the act, though in a more sophisticated way. At one of its
new Hema grocery stores in Shanghai, rolling robots take cooked food out onto a
sort of runway that connects the kitchen to seating. A team of waiters standing
nearby said a human hand was required for soup and steamed dishes, lest the
robots inadvertently splash someone with hot liquid.
An Alibaba spokeswoman said in an email that
the store was a prototype that sought to combine digitization with a unique consumer
experience. “The system has driven significant traffic to the Hema store,” she
added.
Robot restaurants have been popping up across
China. One in Shanghai’s Xujiahui district, Robot Magic Restaurant, cultivates
a space-age, mini-golf ambience. Diners enter through a door on which animated
fairies flap their wings. Inside, a robot with hearts for eyes charged its
batteries in an ersatz cave rimmed by silver stalagmites tipped with glowing
white lights. On the ceiling, fake stars twinkled.
Waiters said their automated counterparts
caused more work than they saved. The robots take trays of food out to
customers, but are unable to lower them to the table. Real waiters stand back
so photos and videos can be taken before shuffling in and serving food the
old-fashioned way.
The robots also break down. Three times
during an hour lunch, a waiter had to lean a robot on its side and take a
blowtorch to the undercarriage to burn out food and trash caught in its axles.
When asked whether he was worried that the robots would take his job, the
waiter laughed.
Still, patrons were impressed.
“I’ve just been to America, and I didn’t see
many new things at all,” said Xie Aijuan, a retiree in her 50s. “I don’t think
they have anything like robotic restaurants there.”
“China is surpassing America,” agreed her
dining companion, Zhuang Jiazheng. “Robots are coming. Tech is advancing. It’s
all a matter of time.”
Paul
Mozur is a Hong Kong-based technology reporter. He writes about Asia's biggest
tech companies, as well as cybersecurity, emerging internet cultures,
censorship and the intersection of geopolitics and technology in Asia. He
previously worked for The Wall Street Journal. @paulmozur