{"id":7555,"date":"2024-10-12T23:12:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-12T21:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidreger.com\/?p=7555"},"modified":"2024-10-12T23:12:00","modified_gmt":"2024-10-12T21:12:00","slug":"a-little-exercise-in-thinking-big","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidreger.com\/en\/a-little-exercise-in-thinking-big\/","title":{"rendered":"A little exercise in thinking big"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-group has-global-padding is-layout-constrained wp-container-core-group-is-layout-1d9b7318 wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\" style=\"padding-top:0;padding-right:var(--wp--preset--spacing--normal);padding-bottom:0;padding-left:var(--wp--preset--spacing--normal)\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The announcement was made a few months ago, and it was short, sharp, and couldn\u2019t have been clearer: China plans to build 35 million robots in the coming years. At first, it\u2019s just an ambitious number. But even if the Chinese only hit 50% of their target, it\u2019s still a figure that challenges us and should push us to start thinking bigger again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I tried to picture 35 million robots in my mind. Not exactly easy. In the movie \u201cI, Robot,\u201d there\u2019s a scene where finished robots are waiting in a massive hall to be shipped out. The hall is gigantic, and the robots take up all the space. A hall the size of a FIFA-standard football field would be about 7,000 square meters. If you can fit one robot per square meter, you\u2019d need 5,000 such halls to house 35 million robots. Spread across the entire German highway network, you\u2019d have one of these halls every 2.6 kilometers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here\u2019s another striking image: in Germany, about 46 million people are employed\u2014working some kind of job. If we distributed 35 million robots among these workers, roughly three out of four German employees would have a robot assistant at their side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We should keep in mind that China regularly achieves more than 85% of its goals. In just a few decades, this massive country has developed from economic insignificance into the second-largest economy in the world, right behind the U.S. When Deng Xiaoping took over after Mao\u2019s death, he initiated a radical shift in the country with his vision: \u201cTo get rich is glorious.\u201d Twenty years ago, Shanghai was home to a quarter of all the construction cranes in the world. Every single day, a new skyscraper was completed! The Transrapid maglev train had just been built and now takes passengers from the city to Pudong International Airport at 430 km\/h. And just for the record: that technology came from Germany, where it was quietly shelved. We stuck to regular rail, and today we\u2019re just happy if our trains even run. A great vision for Germany would be that by 2030, all trains will run on time. And I mean real \u201con time,\u201d not the kind where a 15-minute delay is still considered punctual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Ignore the Naysayers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Have we forgotten how to be visionary? The 38th governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, gave his famous \u201cSix Rules of Success\u201d speech to graduates at the University of California, which went down in history. Rule number four was: \u201cIgnore the Naysayers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The U.S. set itself the goal: \u201cWe choose to go to the moon. Not because it\u2019s easy, but because it\u2019s hard.\u201d John F. Kennedy\u2019s famous vision put people on the moon. Anyone who knows the story of the Apollo missions knows: it was a difficult road, full of setbacks, so technically challenging that we wouldn\u2019t be able to pull it off today. Yet the eventual success became a triumph for the United States and cemented its global leadership. Today, it\u2019s the entrepreneurs of high-tech companies from Silicon Valley, Texas, and the East Coast who continue to amaze us with their visions and their execution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">During my time in San Francisco, I learned how \u201cThe Golden State\u201d developed into one of the largest economies in the world. California was only admitted to the Union in 1850, and back then, it could only be reached by sea, which took nine months, or by land from Missouri, which took a year. The vision of a transcontinental railroad was born\u2014Charles Crocker was its father. But a year after construction started, only 80 kilometers of track had been laid\u2014the task seemed too difficult, and the doubters and naysayers were triumphant! That\u2019s when Crocker said, \u201cWho built the Great Wall of China? If they could do that, they can build this railroad!\u201d He brought 50 Chinese miners to California who had experience with drills and dynamite. Six months later, 3,000 Chinese workers were building the transcontinental railroad. A year later, there were 40,000 Chinese railroad workers. Six years later, the connection between the Atlantic and Pacific was complete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Think big (again)!<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Recently, I wrote on my blog about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/davidreger.com\/en\/the-power-of-vision\/\">power of vision<\/a>. We, too, had visionaries in Germany who created great things. I mentioned Carl Benz and Gottfried Daimler, and also Artur Junghans, who came from the region where I grew up. He formulated the vision, \u201cThe world wakes up with Junghans clocks,\u201d and created the largest clock and alarm factory in the world. Think big! Think bigger! Think biggest! That\u2019s what we need now!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">35 million robots from China? We accept the challenge! Neura Robotics is ignoring the naysayers! It will be tough, it will be hard, but we\u2019re tackling it head-on! We need to deliver quickly if we want to take the lead in humanoid robotics globally. That\u2019s why we\u2019ve already committed to delivering up to 5 million humanoid and cognitive robots by 2030. And this is far from the end of the line\u2014it\u2019s only the beginning of a new era.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>China plans to build 35 million robots in the coming years. A number alone doesn\u2019t make a vision, but it certainly puts Europe under pressure. If we distributed 35 million robots among all employed people in Germany, roughly three out of four German workers would have a robot assistant by their side.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":7234,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[36,38,37,25,217],"tags":[196,141,146,147,179,183,210,61,189],"class_list":["post-7555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-economy","category-robot","category-roboter","category-robots","tag-business-location","tag-china","tag-david-reger","tag-germany","tag-plans","tag-robotic-2","tag-robotics","tag-robotik","tag-vision"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>A little exercise in thinking big - David Reger<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"David Reger\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/davidreger.com\/en\/a-little-exercise-in-thinking-big\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A little exercise in thinking big - 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