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Notes -
Modern Chinese cultural attitudes towards robots are largely taken from the most effervescent outputs of cultural proximates.
In otherwords, Chinese robotics developers are anime nerds. And specifically the anime nerds that got excited by robot companions, with the cutesy human interface therein.
Pudu robotics sells the cat faced robots, with that design feature specifically meant to evoke friendliness and relatability, not the depersonalized industrial robots that western companies like Aethon built. Chinese dog robots like the Go2 and its knockoffs all come with the "dance" and "sit+handshake" command preloaded into hotkeys on the controllers because it is expected that these cute whirring things will be entertaining to children. The Chinese attitude to robots is largely founded on the idea of usability in the human sphere, and the idea that robots will rise up to be a threat to kill us all isn't really on the forefront of their mind.
This is not to say the Chinese are moral in terms of their attitude to robots. They, like everyone else, have military technologists who enthusiastically adopted nerdy shit to be destructive killbots. In particular fixed wing loitering munition robotics seem to be developed by nerds that saw terminator and went 'yes we want that' as opposed to the nerds that saw robots as companions to our lives.
On that note, watch the Chinese space for humanoid form factor robotics. They are using AI to train humanoid movements for dynamic locomotion, or at least an approximation of such. Uh ok no easy way to say this, its sexbots. A number of sex doll companies have already started training AI on porn videos to learn technique and visual presentation, and have integrated character AI (one poster here talked about character chat AI a few months ago and it was great I can't remember who), and said personalities were already rather advanced mid 2024. Fully expect to see domestic humanoid form factor robots come out of China in 2026 onwards. Special functions hidden behind paywall of course.
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