Canada Needs More Robots

When my parents immigrated from South Korea to Canada 25 years ago, I was the only one who thought it was a great idea. Our extended family warned us that we’d all end up working low-wage jobs at restaurants and convenience stores—a stark contrast to my father’s career managing teams of engineers in South Korea’s aviation industry. But South Korea was struggling through a devastating financial crisis. Nearly two million people were out of work, and my father was one of them. With no clear prospect of getting his job back, he decided to take his credentials global. 

I was only 13, and I didn’t understand the economic crisis—but thanks to my dad’s engineering background, I knew all about computers and robots. My friends and I had learned to code as a hobby. Bill Gates was my role model. I thought that when I grew up, I would go beyond Gates’s vision of “a computer in every home” and help put a robot in every home.

I also knew all about the University of Waterloo and its reputation for producing desirable graduates who got work at the large tech companies of the era, like Microsoft and Waterloo’s own BlackBerry. I believed a real story of technological innovation was being written in Canada. Once we moved here, my relatives did end up working their share of menial jobs, but I got to graduate in the second cohort from the University of Waterloo’s Honours Mechatronics Engineering program—an undergraduate program as close to robotic engineering as you could get in the early 2000s.

But things didn’t work out as I’d imagined: I did not become the founder of a global robotics powerhouse, and Canada struggled to write the next chapter in its story of innovation. Instead, the country of my birth became a world leader in automation, with the highest ratio of robots to human workers in the world. And I’m an educator of robotics at McGill University—and an advocate for why Canada, too, should become a global leader in robot integration.

I’m not the only one who thinks we need it. Last year, the Parti Quebecois unveiled a proposal to get Canada to adopt more robots to replace some of our dependence on temporary foreign workers, especially in fields like agriculture, manufacturing and retail. It’s exciting to hear someone propose a vision for robots in Canada.

Many other countries are there already. In South Korea, construction areas are filled with robotic mannequins dressed in construction gear, waving their mechanical arms up and down, day and night, to direct traffic. Inside malls and hotels, mobile robots vacuum and mop floors. Automotive and electronics factories are highly roboticized. Some are fully automated, and others use robots to collaborate with workers—for example, lifting a car while a worker installs parts. At AmorePacific, a chain of beauty stores, customers get consultations from human consultants, and then robots create tailor-made shades of makeup for the customer on the spot—a shift that some germ-conscious consumers preferred in COVID’s wake.

Of course, Canada can’t just import strategies that have worked elsewhere. We have our own unique challenges and advantages that shape what kind of roboticization make the most sense here. Imagine the possibilities in the forestry, mining and energy industries: robots deployed to dense forests in remote parts of Canada where few workers can reach, strategically thinning out trees to reduce the risk of wildfires, while a nearby fleet of autonomous trucks helps transport the logs to where they need to go. This is a vision that FPInnovation, a Canadian non-profit R&D organization, has already been exploring as part of its Forestry 4.0 initiative. Another B.C.-based company, Cellula Robotics, is already deploying autonomous underwater robots to inspect telecommunication lines to offshore mining sites.

Then there are robots in the service sector. Chef Jasper, based in Montreal, is a “food robotics” startup that provides robotic kitchens for senior-living facilities. They cook under a human chef’s supervision, and then human employees deliver the food. There’s also Vancouver-based Sanctuary AI, which is building general-purpose humanoid robots. Last year, one was piloted at a Mark’s retail store, where it packed merchandise and cleaned the store. Just think of what other tasks a fully functional humanoid robot could accomplish.

And yet I often encounter anxiety when talking about these ideas. Canadians worry that robots will replace human workers—a report commissioned by the federal government in 2020 found that public perception of robotics in Canada is stuck in a “fear-mongering” posture, especially due to concerns about jobs being outsourced to machines. But wherever robots are deployed, the benefits speak for themselves: greater GDP growth, more technological innovation and, contrary to expectations, more jobs. A study of manufacturing firms in Spain over a 27-year period found that those that adopted robots enjoyed greater efficiency and higher profits, allowing them to expand and ultimately hire more people, creating more jobs than competitors that didn’t adopt robots. Many other studies have found similar, though usually more modest effects. A more recent study found that investment in robots contributed 10 per cent of growth in GDP per capita in OECD countries from 1993 to 2016. 

What Canada needs is a made-at-home approach to robotization, one that reconciles the excitement of technologists like me with the very real worries of many Canadians. We need to articulate what we want robots to do and how they’ll do it. The good news is that we’ve done this kind of thing before. Canada’s Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy helped build a thriving AI ecosystem during the last decade. We’re still one of the most mistrustful nations when it comes to AI, but a dedicated national strategy has helped make us a major player regardless. We can do the same with robotics, devising a thoughtful national plan that outlines how robots can be designed and deployed and what social infrastructure and policies will be implemented to reduce risks.

We’re talking about more than job growth or job loss. A 2018 report by Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, analyzed the risks and opportunities of new technologies for workers. It found that the productivity gains of automation can come at a cost of increased workload, worker surveillance and the rise of insecure forms of employment. That means workers have to be in on the ground floor—engaged from the start of an automation project to make sure it works with them, not against them.

Canada already has the talent in technology and AI to build robots that can navigate city streets and wilderness, and interact with people in stores and restaurants. Canadians also value human rights, inclusion and diversity. All of this presents an opportunity for Canada to show the world what responsible robotics can look like. Roboticists across provinces have already started to come together since 2021 as the Canadian Robotics Council—a nonprofit—to build a story of robotics for Canada, with or without a national strategy. We’re ready.

Ajung Moon is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University.