China has bigger problems than the United States with declining birth rates and declining marriage rates. Are China’s leaders looking at AI through that lens and worrying about the future of their AI girlfriends and AI boyfriends? absolutely. they are very worried about it. And in fact, they have already started rolling out policies and regulations around AI boyfriends and AI girlfriends. That’s very interesting. They have very negative ideas about wasting time. Basically, what they see as people in Beijing, what they see as counterproductive activities. And in the early days of tech repression, they didn’t think video games were part of China’s vision for a high-growth, technology-powered future where everyone played video games at home. So I think we’re now seeing something similar happening again. For example, there are concerns that AI companions will be a huge time suck for young Chinese people at a time when they should be designing their futures and building startups and a future Chinese version of SpaceX. But is there also a sense that if China doesn’t fix its birth rate, robots are just a way to compete in an aging and low birthrate society, that this is the solution? Is that also part of your theory or way of thinking? absolutely. That’s a big part of this story. In other words, China’s labor force is shrinking. In fact, I think their workforce size peaked over a decade ago. And they rely heavily on manufacturing. They don’t want to let it go. They think it is the engine of the entire economy. So if people don’t want factory jobs anymore, young people want other jobs, and there aren’t enough people to fill the factories, how do you reconcile these two factors?One of the solutions is robots. One solution is to increase the automation of factory production and introduce different types of robots. It’s a classic 6-arm industrial robot —— – 6-axis industrial robot arm —— —— A classic 6-arm, yes —— that can lift a car at once. Alternatively, this mass push by humanoid robots is now being seen as yet another potential solution, if not a complete solution, to this ongoing labor problem. Therefore, China wants to further improve its competitiveness, move up the value chain, and continue producing better and higher value products. But they don’t have the labor force. Therefore, AI and robotics are seen as a way to fill it.
