For whom the robot's bell tolls

Although the robot head count in China is low as a proportion of the number of workers, particularly compared with countries such as Japan and South Korea, the trend is for more and more Chinese workers to lose their jobs to robots, he says.

"China is only getting started and still has a long way to go. ... So I think it can be highly disruptive. It will go on for a long time. It's not something like you install robots for the next year and you then just stop. The number of robots you have just gets bigger and bigger."

Some Americans applaud the use of robots, predicting that since investors will use more of them to replace workers to reduce overheads, more factory jobs will return to the US from China, as happened in the textile industry, Ford says.

"But there are still no jobs for people."

In some industries such as electronics, where the whole supply chain is now in China, it is extremely difficult for US manufacturers to repatriate jobs, he says.

If the day really comes when most people lose their jobs, what exactly are they going to do, then?

"One possible solution is for governments to give people a guaranteed income for survival, based on which they can choose to do other jobs such as research, or starting their own business to get rich. That's not a communist economy, because people can still purchase whatever they want in a market-oriented economy."

Contact the writer at yangyangs@chinadaily.com.cn