Faster, higher, funnier: what we learned from China's robot ...

The event reflected the fact that, for the Chinese Communist party, humanoids are a high priority, offering solutions to a looming demographic crunch in the labour market, rising military ambitions and, as they walk more widely among the people, the state’s desire to tighten its surveillance web. Beijing is fuelling an intensely competitive robot industry by seeding hundreds of companies to create an evolutionary survival of the fittest dynamic, with the games creating a hard deadline for competitors to deliver measurable progress. Xi’s latest five-year plan, approved in March, was studded with pledges to boost robotics industries; accelerate the “practical application of … humanoid robots” and explore “embodied AI in roles experiencing labour shortages or high-risk environments” which