How hidden robots will power Hong Kong’s smart city ambitions, not driverless cars and talking fridges
Ashwani Kohli says Hong Kong’s plan to become a smart city is best served by looking beyond eye-catching innovations to automating routine work processes, which sounds mundane but offers potentially dramatic rewards
It covers government, the private sector, transport, culture and education. Inevitably, the media has focused largely on the aspect that most affects our everyday lives: transport, specifically recommending intelligent transport systems, carpooling and sharing, and apps that show bus arrival times and occupancy, parking space vacancies and more.
These innovations are necessary, and easily capture the public’s imagination, yet the technology that promises to really drive Hong Kong’s evolution to smart-city status is, though less exciting, even more vital.
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First, it is important to define exactly what a smart city is. While it is tempting to point to driverless cars, talking fridges and other shiny tech innovations, most experts would suggest that a true smart city serves to make citizens’ lives easier in an efficient and sustainable manner.
Sure, the ability to get from A to B is part of this, but so is applying for a mortgage and getting on the housing ladder, obtaining the right type of health insurance at the lowest possible cost, securing a place at the educational institute of your choice, and access to cheap loans to start a business.
Robotic process automation is software (commonly referred to as robots) that automates many of the repetitive, rules-based tasks that are currently carried out by white-collar workers in many of Hong Kong’s largest companies and government departments, largely thanks to outdated IT systems that are still in use.
The current system contributes to inefficiency and higher costs, with basic processes such as financial transactions taking days or weeks, rather than minutes; incomplete medical history files that are hard to access; regulatory hurdles that take months to complete, suppressing business activity. The list goes on, and is one of the reasons government, financial and other services are more expensive than they should be.