In a hospital in Harbin, a city in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang province, a Chinese surgeon is very carefully tapping and swiping on her mobile phone. She is giving instructions to an intelligent robot 9,000 kilometres away in downtown Los Angeles. It is removing the kidney of a cancer patient.
The scene sounds like something from a science fiction movie but for Nokia’s chief executive Rajeev Suri it could become reality “very soon”.
Whether he is right or not depends on one vital development the launch of the fifth-generation 5G cellular network, the wireless communication technology that will serve as the backbone for applications including artificial intelligence, connected...