China is one country leading the charge when it comes to embracing robotics and artificial intelligence. Last year, the country saw the first robot dentist successfully operate on a patient, and there are plans to build an unmanned, AI-powered police station in a capital city. Both developments show signs of China's progress to becoming a global leader in AI by 2030. To be a leader in AI, however, also means using such technology in the workforce as a replacement for human workers. Recently, China has done so in using automation to increase its supply of bombs and artillery shells.

Robots could treble China's bomb and shell production capacity in less than a decade according to a senior scientist involved in a programme that is using artificial intelligence to boost the productivity of ammunition factories. Xu Zhigang, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shenyang Institute of Automation and a lead scientist with China's "high-level weapon system intelligent manufacturing programme", told the South China Morning Post last Wednesday that about a quarter of the country's ammunition factories had replaced many workers with "smart machines" or begun to do so. The robots, with man-made "hands and eyes", could assemble different types of deadly explosives including artillery shells, bombs and rockets, he said. They could also make more sophisticated ammunition such as guided bombs, equipped with computer chips and sensors, that could carry out precision strikes. They were five times as productive as a human worker, Xu said, but logistical factors such as the supply of raw materials meant the overall productivity boost would fall between 100 to 200 per cent "at a minimum" once all China's ammunition factories were upgraded in the next decade, Xu said.