Posted on 11/30/2025 6:28:15 PM PST by Red Badger
Excited lanyard guys at a trade show smile at a Unitree humanoid robot © davide bonaldo via Shutterstock
Can everyone dial it down a little with the enthusiasm for humanoid robots that can’t even do anything useful yet? You’re scaring the Chinese economy.
On Thursday, three Bloomberg reporters based in Beijing reported on an usual government announcement from China’s economic central planning department, the National Development and Reform Commission (it has no U.S. equivalent, so don’t even ask): the commission had noticed a pattern of dozens upon dozens of Chinese firms pushing out humanoid robots that do essentially nothing, and do it in pretty much the same way.
Agency spokeswoman Li Chao, Bloomberg said, expressed worry that this wave of robots was in danger of steering smart people away from actual, valuable research.
China seems to be noticing what you’ve probably already noticed: news stories about flashy Chinese robots walking really far, competing in games, and insufficient hype about China’s incomparably vast army of factory worker robots.
China’s version of this trend apparently kicked off when the country watched an admittedly kickass dance performance by a squadron of Unitree bots at the 2025 Spring Festival Gala, a Chinese New Year broadcast that happens to be the single most watched TV event in the world.
VIDEO AT LINK..............
Per Bloomberg’s quoting of Li, “Frontier industries have long grappled with the challenge of balancing the speed of growth against the risk of bubbles—an issue now confronting the humanoid robot sector as well.” It amounts to a not-so-veiled announcement that the state thinks you’re potentially jeopardizing stability if you’re making these things in China.
Bike-sharing apps formed an economic bubble in China, for instance. There were dozens of apps that all did the same thing. Then that bubble disastrously popped, creating embarrassing photo spreads of bike graveyards, serving forever as examples of economic speculation gone mad.
And China is famous for tossing its tech billionaires behind bars—each arrest serving as a potential object lesson to any humanoid robot company CEO thinking about flouting what the Chinese government now says it wants to see: fewer robo-firms.
Bloomberg summarized what Li said the remarkable next steps would be: the government will on one hand expand R&D, and build national infrastructure for testing and training robots, efforts apparently aimed at injecting some much-needed variety into the sector. But It will also apparently create formal rules for entering and exiting the robot market, apparently to tamp down uncreative knock-offs.
So the Chinese robots aren’t going away. But if your product is in the video below, maybe you should consider yourself on notice.
VIDEO AT LINK................
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Wei, Robot................
Scary alright
Quality control is important ,
Footage showing a Unitree H1 (Full-Size Universal Humanoid Robot) going berserk, nearly injuring two workers, after a coding error at a testing facility in China.
https://rumble.com/v6t0m2f-footage-showing-a-unitree-h1-full-size-universal-humanoid-robot-going-berse.html
China government officials finally noticed all these robots don’t do anything useful. .....................
>> Excited lanyard guys
Awesome tradeshow vibe description! ROFL.
>> You’re scaring the Chinese economy.
Fifty million unemployed Americans as “wards of the state” — scary! For US.
ONE BILLION unemployed and unemployable Chinese as “wards of the state”... REALLY REALLY scary! For the CCP.
Safer to own an adult male chimpanzee.
LOL! The Killer App
Remember the experiments with the monkeys that could hit a lever and activate an electrical impulse in the pleasure center of their brain? They’d hammer that lever until they dropped dead of exhaustion. Wouldn’t even stop to eat.
Bump.
If you want Robotic Embarrassment on Exhibit, it’s hard to find something worse than that short video from last week, showing a Russian Robot being introduced from the stage, walking forward about two steps, then collapsing on the wooden floor like a wobbly old drunk.
The theme song from Rocky was being blasted at top volume during this debacle. A parody skit could not have written it better.
Plot twist... those lanyard guys are all robots.
The top Chinese make all the decisions and have all the women they want. So I’m guessing they want robots for war and conquest. Command Commie economies don’t give a damn about their people.
“The Terminal Man” was great that way too
They are creating a replacement for everything a good spouse use to do.
Laundry. Cooking. Cleaning. Vacuuming. Mop. Lawn mowing. Even sex robots.
The future is bleak.
I just don’t get it. Humanoid robots are cool, yeah; fascinating, yeah; marginally useful, maybe; but give me a purpose-built industrial robot any day over one of these show-off toys.
We’re learning things, for sure, but ultimately, humanoid robots will only be useful for sex, for those forlorn folks who can’t deal with human sex.
Your priorities are skewed.
Regards,
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