After the 'Go match of the century' between humans and machines ended, the government made a fuss for a while. As if finally realizing the importance of 'artificial intelligence,' they likely pulled out their future growth engine documents again and highlighted AI-related technologies.

Sure enough, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy held a meeting with artificial intelligence experts from industry, academia, and research institutes after the Go event concluded. A press release stated that the event reviewed the current status of AI development, which was highlighted by the 'Lee Sedol vs. AlphaGo' match, and discussed policy directions to promote applied industrialization.

Attendees of the meeting reportedly emphasized that "other countries are also still in the early stages of industrializing AI applications," stating that "necessary R&D, workforce training, and infrastructure must be established to promote the use of AI in the industry." Given that the issue of establishing R&D, workforce training, and infrastructure is a recurring topic not only in the field of AI but in any sector, it appears the meeting did not yield significant results.

Artificial intelligence was not left out of the discussion at the recent seminar on intelligent robots as a future growth engine. This is because robotics is the most representative industrial sector of artificial intelligence, integrating technologies such as big data and software with high-performance sensor and actuation technologies, and intelligent technology plays a crucial role in the core functions of robots, such as perception and judgment.


▲ RoboHon, a social robot manufactured by Japan's Sharp . It incorporates smartphone functions, allowing it to make phone calls and dance, and also features a beam projector. It is scheduled for release in May. While it cannot be described as a high-performance intelligent robot, it is attracting attention as a commercialized case among various social robots.

On this day, a government official "reaffirmed" the blueprint and roadmap to achieve 6 trillion won in robot production by 2020 through the creation of robot demand and market expansion. While it was announced that support for the development and testing of AI-based pilot products would be increased from the current level of 13 billion won to over 20 billion won annually, and that excellent university research teams would be selected to receive 500 million won in annual funding for R&D of source technologies for industrialization, questions were raised regarding the effectiveness of these measures.

Prior to this, the government announced an 'ambitious' plan to invest 1 trillion won over five years, allocating 200 billion won annually, and to attract more than 2.5 trillion won in private investment, but we have not heard any news about how things have progressed since then.

In the field of intelligent robots, key service sectors for 2020 include medical, safety, next-generation manufacturing, HRI robots that communicate with humans, and defense robots. Among these, the manufacturing robot market accounts for 64% of the total robot market, followed by the professional service (23%) and personal service (13%) robot markets.

Medical and safety service robots are expected to grow rapidly as national income rises.

In particular, as national income rises from $20,000 to $30,000, robot markets in fields such as healthcare, safety, and national defense are emerging as important sectors, and the market for AI personal services that communicate with humans is expected to expand. In other words, while robots have primarily been discussed in terms of manufacturing robots until now, the future will see development centered on platform-based service robots.

Korea ranks fourth in global robot technology competitiveness, and the technology gap with leading nations is estimated to be an average of 1.8 years. However, core technologies remain lacking, and 93.4% of domestic robot companies are small and medium-sized enterprises, resulting in a shortage of specialized mid-sized companies and a small scale of business operations.

Yeo Jun-gu, Director of the Robot Media Research Institute at KIST, stated that half of a robot is artificial intelligence, adding, “The field of artificial intelligence, in which we began investing in 2001, has focused on investing in human resources.” "We need policies that allow us to be more ambitious, investing in source technologies in bottleneck fields rather than R&D that merely imitates others," he said.

Regarding social robots, which are emotion-centered robots that converse and interact with humans, SK Telecom’s Hwang Eun-dong emphasized the importance of building an ecosystem just as much as hardware, stating, “Robots are initially hardware-centric, but like smartphones, apps and services will eventually dominate.”

SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son stated, “A life coexisting with intelligent robots will surely come.” Additionally, the Boston Consulting Group predicted that “robots will become the center that fundamentally transforms the competitive landscape of the global economy.”

Experts say it is urgent to build an ecosystem piece by piece for the future intelligent robot market in professional and personal services. This is because the technology to implement integrated intelligence is still an unexplored field for other countries as well. For instance, the government's role may be to establish a foundation for convergence technology by connecting networks among companies possessing various AI technologies. This would be better than a policy of blindly committing tens or hundreds of billions of won without careful consideration.