The founder of one of China’s largest ecommerce companies has issued a stark warning that its entire delivery workforce of 700,000 people will ultimately be displaced by robotic automation. This replacement of the gig economy with robots, if successful, will spread around the world.
The Financial Times reports that Richard Liu, founder and chairman of JD.com, delivered the warning at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO forum in Shenzhen on Sunday, saying that gig economy jobs will eventually become obsolete as robot delivery systems mature. His comments highlight mounting anxiety among Chinese policymakers about how swiftly advancing automation technologies could destabilize employment for the country’s most economically vulnerable workers.
Liu disclosed that JD.com has already established training partnerships with approximately 120 educational institutions to prepare its army of 700,000 delivery workers for alternative careers, particularly in robot repair and maintenance. He emphasized that mechanical systems inevitably develop faults, creating ongoing demand for technicians capable of servicing automated equipment.
At the forum, Liu stated: “In the future, when robots are delivering parcels, sooner or later, there will be a day when couriers are basically no longer needed.” He added: “It will definitely be robots delivering parcels. But I really do not want our 700,000 brothers to go without meals, without jobs.”
The JD.com founder declined to specify when widespread robot delivery might become reality in China. Nevertheless, various experimental initiatives are already progressing across the country and around the world.
Breitbart News previously reported that Pokemon Go players globally were unwittingly training delivery robots to navigate terrain:
The Visual Positioning System can reportedly pinpoint location down to a few centimeters by analyzing nearby buildings and landmarks, offering a significant improvement over traditional GPS technology. This crowdsourced mapping effort represents one of the largest real-world data collection projects ever undertaken through a mobile gaming application, and demonstrates how user-generated content can be repurposed years after its initial collection.
“It turns out that getting Pikachu to realistically run around and getting Coco’s robot to safely and accurately move through the world is actually the same problem,” Niantic Spatial CEO John Hanke said in a recent interview with MIT Technology Review.
JD.com ranks among China’s foremost online retail enterprises, competing domestically with Alibaba and Meituan while operating its Joybuy platform across multiple European markets including the UK, France, and Germany. The company debuted on Nasdaq in 2014 and maintains a secondary listing in Hong Kong.
Read more at the Financial Times here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.