>>2699778beyond humanoid robots, china is poised to dominate robotics in general. a decade ago, china relied on imported robots for nearly three quarters of its total demand. today, china produces 57% of its industrial robots domestically. local firms are also beginning to take over the higher-end market segments. building an identical robot arm (modeled after the Universal Robots UR5e) in the US is ~2.2x more expensive than in china. and when you look under the hood, even if those components are labeled “Made in USA”, they rely heavily upon china-made parts and materials. that's because china has a dense manufacturing base that is vertically integrated which allows for scale, rapid iteration and innovation. china actually holds about two-thirds of the world’s effective patents in robotics, or over 190 thousand patents.
critically, china is rapidly advancing and at the frontier in many of the parts that make up a robot: actuators, high precision motors, high grade permanent magnets, sensors, battery, gearbox, microcontroller unit, etc. robotics after all is a systems engineering problem. and the end goal is a machine that can produce one or more human unit of work at equal or lower cost than that of a human. it is the mechanical basis for enabling full scale automation of manufacturing, allowing for massive expansion in production capacities through robotic factories that can produce goods entirely autonomously. general purpose robotics would make this indistinguishable from a living organism, with mobile or humanoid-ish robots constantly moving around and solving tasks to support and keep the organism alive and functional. it goes beyond the efficient tools of the 1st to 3rd industrial revolution that enhances human labor. it's an entire new way of producing value because it replaces human labor. this echoes marx's 'fragments on machine' , where he speculates: “As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth… capital itself is destroyed,” and "The development of fixed capital [machinery] tends to reduce the direct labor time employed in production, thereby undermining the very foundation on which capitalist production rests." and china is setting itself up as the country with the capability to do this because it has the massive industrial base to scale the production of robots and the production of energy to power the whole damn thing. these robotic systems will also evolve and self improve as AI foundation models become more reliable, accurate, and self improving. china already has enabled robots to build robots at their KUKA (owned by china) factory in guangdong. while the US is also at the frontier of AI, AI only becomes historically transformative and reaches its full potential when it is embedded into material production systems, that is, when atoms meets algorithms…. within historical materialism, it is the advancement of the forces of material production that drives changes to the relations of production, galvanizing a historical site of struggle, which brings me to my next thought.
on the gala performance, we see the literal and figurative dance of the dialectic, the interplay between humans and technology, the real, ongoing contradiction between the development of machines alongside human culture and labor. the fact that it's at a cultural event, the spring festival (spring representing dialectical renewal) now marks technology not just being introduced as a tool but as an agentic participant within historical materialism and social practice. the youth in the video obviously represent the new generation that will inherit these new forces. notably, it stages a sequence of approach/awe, confrontation and integration. this actually mirrors how marxist theory describes the historical emergence of new productive forces. the video starts off with with kicks, blocks, circling at a testing distance like kung-fu sparring, not cooperative dance at first. kung fu itself represents discipline over power, learning the logic of motion, understanding an opponent, etc. when the kids square up with the robots, the robots are presented as an opponent force and an alien power. this is basically a theatrical version of a worker encountering autonomous automation (notice how the robots are able to manipulate and wield tools). the youth seems to be able to overpower or outmaneuver the robots but the robots actually come back as the return of the negated with increasing power. the robots come back more dynamic, faster, and more numerous led by some final boss, even the weapon is upgraded. humans can no longer simply dominate but must adapt. they learn to reorganize life around these new quality productive forces. if the humans defeated them, the message would be technophobia. if the robots dominated, the message would be dystopia. instead, it ends with cooperative movement and harmony, a new higher stage of historical development.