Wild about tech, China even loves waiters that can’t serve
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 short 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 consultancy that hosted the event, declined to comment except for: two emojis showing