James Kynge

We've got robots that are now dexterous enough to make dim sum.

We've got robots that are now beating the world record holder in half marathons by nearly 10 minutes.

And then we've got factory automation all over the park in China.

I'm not surprised the Chinese government is getting really concerned about people's jobs, the big job shock that's coming.

On my recent trip to China, everybody I spoke to who wasn't in the AI robotics industry seemed to be genuinely worried about this.

So I'm really not surprised the Chinese government is getting concerned.

And, you know, my sense of it is, to be quite frank,

I think China's going to lose this.

I don't think China can put this genie back in the bottle.

China is coming up with all kinds of rules and regulations, and it's even proposed setting up a global body

to regulate AI, known as the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization.

And the aim of a lot of these Chinese rules and regulation is to prevent the job shock from AI and automation and robotics onto society.

But frankly,

I can't see how they're going to do it because once a technology is available to do something much more efficiently and cheaply, then my experience of the world is that that is what generally happens.

No, I mean, I was absolutely amazed at that very point.

I went to an exhibition center in southern Beijing where they had robots that had been designed for all kinds of specific tasks.

In my mind, I thought of it as speciation of robots.

So you don't have a general purpose robot that can do everything.

You have a robot that's able to do surgery, have a robot that's able to

hand people at the chemist the drugs that they need.