Europe Wants a Robot Army to Challenge the U.S. and China on AI

At the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in southwest England, dozens of tiny metal machines were poised to dance over a shiny white surface in “swarming“ experiments to track how they organize themselves and work together, according to Bloomberg.

The scene at the European Union-funded facility this week mirrored what the continent is now trying to do to compete with the U.S. and China in Artificial Intelligence. The European Commission wants to create a network of hundreds of Digital Innovation Hubs like the one in Bristol. The aim is to help Europe’s companies and scientists work together to boost research and the take-up of new technologies among the thousands of small and medium-sized companies that form the backbone of the economy.

“The idea is that all these nodes will connect and communicate with each other, maximizing the impact of the technologies and expertise they develop,“ said Farid Dailami, an associate professor who runs the prototype hub in Bristol, which connects researchers and funding with companies that need robotics.

Europe already has two of the world’s largest robotics companies, ABB of Switzerland and Germany’s Kuka. Yet it has no vast internet platforms on the scale of Google or Tencent to hoover up the data that underlie many current technological advances in AI. Worse, those American and Chinese tech giants have deep pockets, allowing them not only to fund expensive research, but also to scoop up successful European startups. Kuka was bought by a Chinese company while Google acquired the U.K.’s budding AI star, DeepMind.

One problem is that despite efforts to build a digital single market, the EU’s 500 million-strong population is divided among 28 nations. Universities, funding and other networks that underpin research are disjointed. “Fierce international competition requires coordinated action for the EU to be at the forefront of AI development,“ Andrus Ansip, the European Commission’s vice president for the digital single market, said in a statement announcing the EU initiative. That situation is only likely to get worse after the U.K. leaves the EU next year.

Commission officials point to a vibrant European research environment, but worry that when it comes to monetizing those ideas the continent is falling behind. The commission’s solution is to inject more money to spur 20 billion euros of extra research funds for AI across the bloc; more vocational training; cheaper rights for companies to reuse the big data that Europe’s highly developed public sector collects through health, transport and other services; and a new network of research and business outreach hubs, modeled on Dailami’s operation in Bristol.