Other goals include raising US$2 million (Bt64 million) in contributions to provide scholarships for Asean technology students, ensuring an additional 200,000 digital workers are hired across the region, and engaging at least 20,000 citizens through “Digital Inspiration Days”, whereby companies invite students and the public to visit their offices and learn more about the character of the jobs of the future. There will also be internship opportunities for Asean university students, as well as initiatives to train digital regulators and shape the curricula of technology and computing courses at 20 Asean universities.

The aim of the pledge is to establish a regional movement among businesses committed to empowering individuals through skilling, reskilling and upskilling. It will not only increase the number of workers hired for digital jobs and trained in digital skills, but also help support business leaders with insight and analysis of what other companies in the region are doing to build a future-focused workforce.

“The Fourth Industrial Revolution is unfolding at accelerating speed and changing the skills that workers will need for the jobs of the future,” said Justin Wood, Head of Asia Pacific and Member of the Executive Committee at the World Economic Forum. “These changes are happening just as the working-age population in Asean is expanding by 11,000 people every day – a rate that will continue for the next 15 years. Given these trends, it’s critical that businesses help to build digital skills in Asean.”

Called “Asean Digital Skills Vision 2020”, the public pledge is open for all companies to join, but a number of early champions have already made strong commitments. Google has pledged to train 3 million SME employees throughout the Asean region by the end of 2020, while Cisco, Lazada, Microsoft, and the Sea Group have pledged to train another 5,634,000 SME workers.

The pledge also calls for companies to offer Asean citizens the opportunity to participate in Digital Inspiration Days, and Cisco, Microsoft, Grab and Sea Group have collectively committed to offer the opportunity to 1,035,000 Asean citizens by 2020. Similarly, the pledge calls for internships for Asean university students, and Microsoft, Sea Group and Tokopedia together have committed to hire 18,000 interns. Microsoft has also pledged to hire an additional 8,500 Asean digital workers by 2020.

Supported by the Forum’s Digital Asean initiative, success stories and innovative approaches will be shared through an online platform to magnify their impact, and a series of workshops involving the private sector and government will be staged over the next two years to ensure the efforts of businesses both align with, and help to shape, public policy on training and education.

Pichet Durongkaveroj, minister of digital economy and society of Thailand, and one of the advisers of the Digital ASEAN initiative, said: “The rise of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics is creating concern about the future of work. But I am more optimistic. I believe that if workers have the right skills, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be highly empowering and will lift wages and living standards in Thailand and across the region. But we need to make sure that workers receive the right training and education today.”

$1-tn lift in GDP

Rajan Anandan, vice president for India and Southeast Asia at Google, said: “Asean could see an uplift of $1 trillion in GDP by 2025 by using its digital economy to accelerate intra-regional trade and growth.

SMEs will be the key to this growth and their digital workforce will be the change agents in their communities. We’re committed to supporting Southeast Asia’s promising digital economy.”

Forrest Li, chairman and chief executive officer of the Sea Group, said: “The ASEAN region is brimming with entrepreneurial potential. But for SMEs to start businesses and grow them successfully, they’ll need to learn the right skills for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Building on our existing efforts to enable SMEs around the region to benefit from the opportunity of e-commerce, we are committed to making a major contribution to providing these skills.”

Naveen Menon, president of Cisco Systems in Asean, said: “Asean’s economy is poised to grow further as digital innovation and adoption gather pace. However, the increased adoption of technology will result in a change in the nature of jobs and workforce requirements across the region, which demands rapidly reskilling. We are committed to work with all stakeholders to build a sustainable pool of homegrown talent in Asean.”

Lucy Peng, chairwoman and chief executive officer of the Lazada Group, said taking part in the World Economic Forum pledge is one of the key levers to create an inclusive and sustainable e-commerce ecosystem to support Southeast Asia’s economic growth. “Sellers want to go beyond trading on a platform. They want to create their own universe in the digital world to reach out and connect with Internet-savvy and increasingly mobile consumers,” she said.

“We are championing our seller communities by using our technology and logistics infrastructure to help them ride the e-commerce boom and flourish into sustainable businesses.”

The Digital Asean initiative was launched by the World Economic Forum in Singapore in April 2018 in response to demand from the Forum’s regional partners in Asean, both public and private.

The aim is to work on the issues that will underpin a regional digital economy in Asean so that the benefits of the Fourth Industrial Revolution can be fully unlocked and become a force for regional economic inclusion.

Vatsun Thirapatarapong, managing director of Cisco System (Thailand) said the firm will support digital training of the workforce in the areas of networking , cyber security, IoT, and IT essential. The collaboration will help reduce duplicated training.

It will also provide the training to vocational students.

Japan’s Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry and the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry have presented a draft road map stipulating the start of flying cars’ practical use in the 2020s.

According to the draft, shown to a public-private council meeting last week, necessary technologies and regulations will be developed by the middle of the 2020s and flying cars will be used to carry people and goods on remote islands and in mountainous areas. Their use for human transportation in urban areas is set to start in the 2030s.

At the meeting, some members |suggested that flying cars be put into first-aid and disaster response operations after their safety is secured. – Jiji Press

Robot takes the wheel, brakes for pedestrian

A humanoid robot drove a car in a demonstration event held last week in Toyota, Aichi Prefecture. The Toyota city government and a University of Tokyo laboratory have been conducting research on developing a robot capable of driving a car. They developed a new robot named Musashi, which is about 1.6 metres tall and is able to move its fingers and toes. Cameras mounted in its eyes and sensors inside the body enable the robot to |recognise its own posture and detect |vibrations.

Those advanced features help Musashi drive in a manner closer to that of human beings, compared to previous robots. It is expected that the new technology will be utilised to develop prostheses for the disabled and driving assistance for the elderly, among other applications.

Musashi drove a small electric vehicle for about 20 metres at a nearly walking speed, steering the car smoothly. Visitors including students from a local elementary school were fascinated with the demonstration, especially when Musashi stopped the vehicle after recognising a pedestrian crossing the road ahead. – The Yomiuri Shimbun

Haidilao opens smart restaurant in Beijing

Haidilao, China’s biggest hotpot restaurant chain, recently unveiled its first smart hotpot restaurant in Beijing.

The kitchen, equipped with two rows of robotic arms, can automatically collect pre-packaged dishes from a cold storage. According to Haidiliao, the whole process, from placing an order to delivering food to customers, only takes two minutes in ideal condition.

Founded in Sichuan province by Zhang Yong 24 years ago, Haidilao now has 362 outlets in the country, as well as outlets in Singapore, Japan, South Korea and the US. – China Daily

Cheng, who helped China enter the atomic age, passed away on Saturday in Beijing at the age of 101.

A great number of people wrote that they will always be grateful to Cheng for his contribution to the nation and its defence. One microblogger who goes under the name of Dandingchaogupiao called Cheng “a hero and backbone of the Chinese nation”, while DiqianQueen wished to tell Cheng: “When you were born to the motherland, she was miserable and desolate. But when you left today, she has become beautiful and magnificent.”

Born on August 3, 1918, in Wujiang, Jiangsu province, Cheng went to a middle school in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, in 1931.

He studied physics at Zhejiang University in 1937 and became an assistant lecturer there in 1941 after his graduation.

In 1946, Cheng went to the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, obtaining a PhD in 1948 under adviser Max Born, a distinguished German physicist and mathematician.

In 1950, the young physicist returned to China and performed research in physics at two universities.

The career path of Cheng was transformed in the summer of 1960 when he was summoned to China’s nuclear weapons programme .

Cheng was named chief designer of China’s nuclear test technology in 1962 and personally designed the explosion test method of the country’s first atomic bomb, which made China the world’s fifth nuclear power in 1964.

Later the scientist took part in more than 30 nuclear tests and worked at a nuclear test base in northwestern China for more than 20 years until he was named a top defense technology adviser |and returned to Beijing in the mid-1980s.

Thousands of Filipino cleaners with the more glamorous title of “content moderators” work secretly inside skyscrapers in a business district in Metro Manila where they sit in front of large computer monitors, combing the vastness of cyberspace in a virtual search-and-destroy mission to expunge deeply disturbing images and videos.

According to the documentary, “The Cleaners,” Filipino moderators erase around 25,000 such materials uploaded daily — from Islamic State beheading videos to human genitalia, child abuse, pornography and political chaos — out of 500,000 videos or 2.5 million Facebook posts from over 3 billion global internet users.

The 90-minute documentary film by multimedia creators Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck of the German company Gebrueder Beetz FilmProduktion, tells the story of the content scavengers of the digital world who do their job following the community guidelines of US social media platforms.

The German crew spent almost a month in the Philippines for research and interviews.

Block and Riesewieck found that the main hub of this new industry, which is manned by around 10,000 people mostly from the Third World, was Metro Manila where labour is cheap and a huge chunk of the population is wired to the Internet.

The industry is funded by Facebook and Google, which had admitted outsourcing to third parties the digital cleaning, or deleting, of inappropriate content.

The Filipino cleaners work for giant tech companies but are not their direct employees. They must sign iron-clad nondisclosure contracts to get the job to “delete or ignore” any content deemed offensive.

After its global premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the filmmakers decided to bring the documentary to the Philippines through an exclusive screening for students, journalists and cyberexperts on Friday at the University of the Philippines Cine Adarna.

Artist Illma Gore, whose controversial rendering of a naked Donald Trump was taken down by a moderator in 2016, warned in the film that this practice could be a form of censorship of artistic expression.

Without directly addressing the Trump image takedown, one of the five Filipino moderators interviewed said: “Our goal is to make the platform as healthy as possible. Someone needs to guard it just like the real world.”

Although a cleaner does his job anonymously partly to avoid reprisals, it nevertheless takes a personal toll.

Each post that he deletes or ignores also unnerves him until the experience accumulates into a serious psychological trauma that, in at least one instance, had a fatal consequence.

One Filipino male moderator, whose request to be reassigned from monitoring live self-harm videos on Facebook was refused, took his own life in front of his computer at work. A female moderator said cleaners had to do a “difficult, dirty job” to survive in a poor country like the Philippines.

“My parents always tell me, ‘Study well, aim for a job so you won’t end up cleaning [another person’s] garbage. Your job is to make people around the world think that it’s safe online, but your job is not safe for you,” she said.

A third moderator, an avowed supporter of President Duterte, appeared comfortable with his job and echoed sentiments of the president in defending his war on drugs.

“How Duterte is making the Philippines safe, that’s what I’ve been doing in my job,” he said.

“Being a content moderator,” the cleaner said, “is like being a sniper—targeting users who are breaking rules of the application.”

The film showed him going over photos of victims of extrajudicial killings and drug-related violence at work and partying later in the night with the Duterte Diehard Supporters in a Mocha Girls show.

According to local production company Blender Media, which provided logistic assistance in the Philippines for the documentary, offering services to foreign filmmakers was nothing new to it, but “the scope and complexity of ‘The Cleaners’ caught us by surprise.”

That Filipinos provided the majority of the sweatshop-like labour force for cleaning cyberspace was not surprising.