According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2020, machines might displace 85 million jobs by 2025. Can robots or artificial intelligence, on the other hand, grow smarter and more sophisticated than human intellect? How is the future of robotics in Saudi Arabia? Read on to take a closer look at this industry.
In the 1960s sitcom The Jetsons, we meet a family of future humans living in 2062 along with Rosey — their robot maid, while mister Jetson had a robot helper named Mac. The Jetsons was only a cartoon, but it sure represented what the future looked for people 60 years earlier, and the future they envisioned may not be far anymore
We are only seven decades removed from Unimate — the first robot ever, but we have done a lot in that time. As our manufacturing grew more precise and our technologies more advanced, we found ourselves on the verge of fulfilling the ever-haunting prophecy of creating a really intelligent robot that outsmarts us.
Intelligent robots really around the corner?
In a paper titled, “When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts” published in 2020, elite researchers in artificial intelligence predicted that human-level machine intelligence (HLMI for short), has a 50 percent chance of occurring within the next 45 years and a 10 percent chance of occurring within the next 9 years.
The jury is still out on whether HLMI is even possible, but if it is so, we are closing on it. Companies are making great progress in developing AI for many different fields, and governments like the ones of UAE and Saudi Arabia are making great strides in the field by allocating more attention and even investing further in AI startups.
We still rely on the imitation game (better known as the Turing test currently) to decide if a computer or any other machine is intelligent. The test is designed to see if a machine can act indistinguishably from a human or not, and seven decades later the test has not been passed yet.
Looking at modern chatbots and digital assistants, the HLMI may seem already here. But no matter how impressive Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant may look for us, they are still clearly distinguishable and far from perfection.
One close instance was maybe the robot Sophia that took the world by storm and even gained Saudi citizenship in 2017 as the first-ever robot to gain citizenship of a sovereign state ever. Yet, Sophia was limited to a handful of subjects, and even in these subjects, she sometimes strayed away giving nonsensical or out-of-context answers.
The current state of robotics
According to Allied Market Research, the global robotics technology market size was valued at $62.75bn in 2019 and is projected to reach $189.36bn by 2027. That emphasizes two important facts: the robotics market is still relatively small, and there is optimism in the field keeping growth high.
We already have very interesting use cases of robotics in our world today. For example, surgical robots are getting wider than ever use-cases benefiting from the advent of new technologies like IoMT and 5G.
There is a lot to see in the manufacturing space too, as smart robotic arms are being deployed in many factories worldwide, allowing for more automation. Even in warehouses, Amazon has been using robots for years now, and it recently unveiled new models like Ernie and Bert designed to improve worker safety and reduce incident rates.
Robots still face issues though: the technology is not there yet for many proposed use cases. Another issue arises from robotics lacking the economy of scale that allowed many other technologies to get cheaper.
Instead of being built-in bulk for general use cases, robots are mostly being custom-built. That makes them very expensive and not financially viable for many usages. Hopefully, that will change with time as the technologies mature, thus, reducing the costs of development and manufacturing.
Robotics in Saudi Arabia
According to IDC, spending on RPA (robotic process automation) in Saudi Arabia is set to reach $27.4m in 2023, increasing at a CAGR of 56percent from 2019. The size of RPA is still small in the kingdom, but it’s outgrowing most other countries in this regard, as automation has been recognized as one of the goals of the ambitious Vision 2030.
Saudi Arabia has been making great strides in robotics usage and development. For example, Aramco has designed, developed, and tested its Shallow Water Inspection and Monitoring Robot (SWIM-R) in less than two years. The company has also developed Saudi Aramco Inspection Robot (SAIR) as a robotic crawler capable of conducting a visual inspection, ultrasonic thickness gauging, and gas sensing on hard-to-reach steel surfaces.
Away from oil, robotics and AI can be two important diversifying paths for the kingdom and its growing economy. The Saudi industry minister said the country aims for 4000 factories to be automated within five years, making Saudi Arabia a leader in automation and a manufacturing powerhouse.
On the intelligent robot front, Saudi Arabia can benefit from the advent of smarter robots and machines. Such robots may help fix the labor shortage that made the kingdom reliant on foreign labor for decades. The futuristic city of Neom will gain from robots as it plans to have smart infrastructure and deploy futuristic construction methods like 3D printing.
Everything considered, robots are growing in abilities and importance in our lives, and in the coming decades they will be a major force in getting the fourth industrial revolution underway. Robots that rival our intelligence may take a long time to come, but what we already have is enough to revolutionize everything.
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