Will China’s ‘AI Ship Designer’ Make Human Workforce Obsolete?
Here, we discuss if China’s “AI ship designer” will make the human workforce obsolete
On February 27, a paper written by a group of researchers from China’s AI Ship Designer and Research Centre and led by senior engineer Luo Wei was published in the Chinese-language journal Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems.
In the paper, the researchers claimed that their AI Ship designer only needed a day to complete work that would have taken humans nearly a year using the most advanced computer tools. AI Ship Designer makes Human Workforce Obsolete.
Considering the size and complexity of modern warships, errors are bound to occur during the design process, and rectifying them can take several hours. However, when the AI designer was put to the test with more than 400 difficult tasks, the researchers discovered that the AI could achieve 100% accuracy.
The researchers claim that their Artificial Intelligence designer was “ready for engineering applications” in China’s shipbuilding industry to increase the rate of warship production, even though there is still room for improvement.
According to Luo’s team, the Chinese military funded their AI designer project because, rather than shipyard delays, the design process was the main obstacle to the speed of warship production.
The team led by Luo compared their AI designer to those created by Google to speed up the design of computer chips. The team claims that there were some significant distinctions between the two.
First, the team states in the paper that while the AI chip designer can make a few mistakes, warship design leaves no room for error.
In addition, the group asserted that even though an AI chip designer could produce a large number of products, the company could still generate a profit margin by allocating computing resources to train it.
While their AI warship designer lacked the resources of a Big Tech company and was only working on one vessel, Additionally, the team’s warship designer is a machine that operates under human supervision, in contrast to an AI system that learns and makes decisions on its own.
The AI designer develops a design after consulting a decades-old database of Chinese ship design knowledge and experience. The design is then compared to the database. This method, according to Luo’s team, eliminated errors and significantly decreased the number of computing resources required.
Additionally, the team pointed out that only the layout of electrical systems had demonstrated the AI designer’s effectiveness. However, it could be used with a small computer system and completed these design tasks much more quickly and accurately than humans.
The team went on to say that “other countries may have developed similar systems, but they have not disclosed them publicly due to the military sensitivity.”
