Drone event at WorldSkills spotlights demand for multidisciplinary talent

The ongoing 48th WorldSkills Competition in Shanghai has introduced a drone event combining engineering, programming and piloting, underscoring demand for multidisciplinary technicians as unmanned aircraft find wider commercial use.

The four-day Unmanned Aerial Systems contest began Wednesday at Shanghai's National Exhibition and Convention Center, with results due at the closing ceremony on Sunday.

All 11 competitors spent the opening day assembling and calibrating their drones. China's entrant Zeng Chen, an instructor at the Hangzhou Technician Institute in east China's Zhejiang Province, was the first to complete the assembly and begin a test flight, according to the event's competition manager.

Across six modules, competitors must shift among three roles: engineer, programmer and pilot. They assemble and repair drones, debug software and write flight plans, perform complex maneuvers and respond to emergencies.

That mix mirrors the real-world job of an unmanned aerial systems technician, a role that spans aerodynamics, flight-control systems, communications, robotics and software.

"The obstacle-avoidance module requires competitors to process point-cloud data, which is then used to generate a three-dimensional indoor map. The task is a bit like navigating a maze. The drones may also have to carry sandbags or other payloads for remote delivery, making that part extremely challenging," said Gu Junjie, a coach for the Unmanned Aerial Systems competition.

Judges assess competitors on their adherence to operating procedures, work quality, completion time and ability to diagnose and resolve faults.

Zeng's performance over the first three days drew praise from Alan Ball, unmanned aerial systems skill competition manager.

"Chinese competitor -- he has done very well in the competition so far. Yes, in the overseas market, the drones are used in multiple different industries, from security to agriculture to safety to surveys, mapping. As a career as a drone technician, I think, globally, the future of drones is very bright," Ball said.

Drone event at WorldSkills spotlights demand for multidisciplinary talent

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday that humans must dramatically speed up how they communicate with artificial intelligence (AI), predicting that without brain-chip technology, superfast AI will eventually view talking to a human like "talking to a tree."

Speaking to China Media Group (CMG) in Silicon Valley, Musk referred to biological enhancement as a critical focus area, stressing that brain-computer interfaces such as Neuralink are essential to closing the massive speed gap between humans and AI.

"Biological enhancement with like Neuralink, this company I created with some other people where we want to try to solve the bandwidth constraint that humans have. So you can imagine, like even in the most benign scenario where the AI is super friendly and wants to do everything you can (think of), it wants to make you happy, it's just our rate of communication is too slow. So like average, the peak human bandwidth is only about 100 bits per second roughly. And our input bandwidth is much higher because of vision, so there we maybe have, it's a debatable point, but you know, a megabit per second or a few megabits per second from our eyes, which are in fact like cameras. But our output bandwidth is really low, maybe 100 bits per second, whereas computers are communicating at a trillion bits per second," he explained.

"So anything we can do to increase the communication speed of humans will improve, I think, the alignment of humans and machines. Because otherwise, to an AI that is communicating at a terabyte a second, talking to a human will be like talking to a tree. You known, when you talk to a tree, it takes a long time to respond," said Musk.

Elon Musk highlights biological enhancement as key to closing AI speed gap