Technological advances have made the machines nimble enough to pack bento boxes with precision.
Revolution, said Mao Zedong, is not a dinner party. Maybe yes. But that doesn’t mean that when the revolution comes, food won’t be involved.
This week in Tokyo, in front of a huge crowd of visitors from the Asian food industryintartificial choice and robots presented their plans to take over.
Technological advances in recent years, human advocates for robots say, have given them something they’ve always lacked: dexterous, spatially aware hands. These are trained wrapping hands who first take care of the cooked spaghetti and Dumplings steamed; then fried chicken, shortbread and onigiri rice balls with grilled salmon.
There was no way to disguise the robots’ ambitions. There was no time to welcome the impending human superfluity of concession or to glance at the need for moderation. A diverse number of kitchen robots – among which there were Foodly, Delibot and Nantsune Scorpion– they do not threaten conquest by subterfuge or shock, but offer a manifesto of unmitigated substitution.
Buy our machines today,” said representatives of hundreds of manufacturers at the fair, “and tomorrow you will do without people.” Brochures announcing ever-improving features of robots They showed people as gray silhouettes on a future production line, the ghosts of those the potential buyer would no longer need to employ.
And the public, mostly Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese, who attended to the Fooma Japan exhibition (which, not coincidentally, represented the country with the largest demographic representation in the region) came precisely because of this. The food industry lives on the edge and is often a black spot for increasing productivity. Companies want AI and robots: Unlike other industries, the debate revolves around production and price. Japan’s declining population and years of stagnation made it brave (future historians might conclude reckless) to embrace AI-powered automation; Other nations know they will have to do the same very soon.
In this context, Fooma’s exhibition presents a stratification of various revolutions, some desirable, some necessary. The most obvious of these is productivity: the latest government figures on Japan’s food industry put it well below general production. A 2022 Bank of Japan paper lamented the continued sluggishness of productivity growth and the resulting slowness with which resources tended to shift from low-productivity to high-productivity sectors.
The report suggests that the improvement will be driven by two changes in the allocation of resources and, above all, by a more liquid labor market in which workers seek the necessary skills for the highest productivity sectors. In other words, Japan needs AI robots packing lunch boxes and filling rice balls to help its dwindling human capital. can attend to other tasks.
The revolution that was most visible in Tokyo this week was technological and unfinished, according to experts on this type of event. The industry has always embraced automation, but it has also found certain gaps in its processes – such as quality control – where only humans currently fit. Japan, whose shops and supermarkets require an immense daily production of ready meals, is more aware of this.
Several recent articles on robotic food handling highlight this issue: when foods are slippery, sticky or break easilythe human hand is often the only option for some parts of the process.
But now, thanks to a combination of more sophisticated sensors, AI tools that can handle overlapping substances, and more sensitive grasping tools, that’s changed: robotic hands can gently grasp a bowl-sized portion of pasta or pick out three fried pieces. chicken from the vat of a thousand. They may work a little slower than humans, salespeople agree, but they never sleep. Fujiseiki is one of the companies that can now sell fully automated processes for work, typically laborious, assembling bento boxes, onigiri and other packaged semi-finished products.
However, the most surprising aspect of this new generation of robots was the way in which Their handlers claim to replace humans: on a small scale in each company, but in the tens of thousands across the industry. Whether it’s sales staff explaining the cost savings they offer or brochures that show the ghost workers who will be replaced This revolution will take jobs – or free people, depending on how you look at it – two by two or three by three.
© The Financial Times Limited (2024). All rights reserved. The FT and Financial Times are registered trademarks of Financial Times Limited. Redistribution, copying or modification is prohibited. EXPANSIÓN is solely responsible for this translation and Financial Times Limited is not responsible for its accuracy.
