Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Revolution, said Mao Zedong, is not a dinner party. Maybe so. But that doesn\u2019t mean that when the revolution comes, there won\u2019t be food involved.\u00a0This week in Tokyo, to a huge visiting throng from Asia\u2019s food production industry, artificial intelligence and robots set out their plans to seize control.\u00a0Technological advances made over just the past few years, claim the robots\u2019 human advocates, have given them something they always lacked: smart, soft and spatially aware hands. These are working hands for packers that will come first for the cooked spaghetti and steamed dumplings; then for the fried chicken, frangible biscuits and broiled salmon onigiri rice balls.There was no disguising the robots\u2019 ambitions. This was not the time for a concessionary salute to impending human redundancy nor nod to the need for moderation. The ranks of food-processing automata \u2014 an array that included Foodly, Delibot and the Nantsune Scorpion \u2014 are not threatening conquest by subterfuge or attrition, but offer an unapologetic manifesto of replacement.Buy our machines today, said the trade-show sales reps from hundreds of manufacturers, and you can do away with people tomorrow. Pamphlets showcasing the robots\u2019 ever more brilliant talents pictured humans as grey silhouettes on the future production line \u2014 the ghosts of those a would-be buyer would no longer need to employ.And the mainly Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese crowds at the Foodma Japan exposition (not coincidentally representing the region\u2019s most demographically skewed nations) had come for exactly this. The food production industry lives on the finest of margins and is often a black spot for productivity gains. Companies want AI and robots: unlike other sectors, the debate is all about output and price. Japan\u2019s shrinking population and years of stagnation have given it a fearlessness (future historians may conclude recklessness) in embracing AI-powered automation; other nations know they will have to do the same very soon.In this context, the Foodma expo represents a layering of multiple revolutions \u2014 some desirable, some necessary.\u00a0The most obvious of these is productivity: the government\u2019s latest figures in Japan\u2019s food production industry put it substantially lower than for general manufacturing. A 2022 Bank of Japan paper bemoaned the persistently unchallenging productivity gains, and the related slowness with which resources tended to move from low to high productivity sectors.Improvement will come, the report implied, with twin upheavals in resource allocation and \u2014 critically \u2014 a more liquid labour market where workers chase the skills necessary for higher productivity sectors. Japan needs AI-powered robots packing lunch boxes and filling rice balls, in other words, so that its dwindling stock of human capital can do other work.The revolution most prominently on display in Tokyo this week, said veterans of these events, was technological and a work in progress. This industry has always embraced automation, but has also lived with gaps in its processes \u2014 such as quality control \u2014 where only humans currently fit. Japan, whose convenience stores and supermarkets demand immense daily production of ready-to-eat meals, is especially aware of this.\u00a0A number of recent papers on robotic food handling highlight the issue: when food is porous, slippery, sticky or easily broken, human hands have tended to be the only option for parts of the process.But now, by combining more elaborate sensors, AI tools for dealing with overlapping uneven substances and more sensitive gripping tools, that is no longer true: robot hands can gently grasp a precisely sized portion of pasta from a bowl, or select three pieces of fried chicken from a vat of thousands. They may work a little slower than people, agree the sales folk, but they never sleep. Fujiseiki\u00a0was among a number of companies now able to sell fully automated, beginning-to-end processes for the normally labour-intensive job of assembling bento lunch boxes, onigiri and other packaged pre-cooked foods.The most striking aspect of this new generation of soft-handed robots, though, was the way in which their handlers say they will replace humans: on a small scale at the individual company level, but in the tens of thousands across an entire industry. Whether it was the sales staff explaining the cost savings on offer or the brochures showing the ghost workers about to be replaced, the revolutionaries will be taking jobs \u2014 or liberating humans, depending on your view \u2014 two or three at a time.leo.lewis@ft.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Revolution, said Mao Zedong, is not a dinner party. Maybe so. But that doesn\u2019t mean that when the revolution comes, there won\u2019t be food involved.\u00a0This week<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-107263","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}