Opinion | Why China Fears the ‘A.I. Girlfriend’

China has a bigger problem than the U.S. with falling birthrates, falling marriage rates. Are China’s leaders looking at A.I. through that lens and worrying about the A.I. girlfriend, A.I. boyfriend future? Definitely. They are very worried about that. And, in fact, they are already rolling out policies and regulations around A.I. boyfriends and A.I. girlfriends. It’s so funny — they have a very negative view of wasting time, basically of what they see, the folks in Beijing, what they see as nonproductive activity. And in that earlier era of a tech crackdown, they saw video games as not really part of the Chinese vision for a high-growth, technologically powered future when everyone’s at home playing video games. So I think right now we’re seeing something similar happen again, with worries that A.I. companions could end up being a big time sink for Chinese youth, when they should be engineering the future and building out the start-ups and the future Chinese versions of SpaceX, for example. But is there also a sense that this is the solution, if China never fixes its birthrate, that robots are just the way that aging, low-birthrate societies compete? Is that also part of the theory or the mind-set? Definitely. That’s a big part of the story. So, China has a shrinking work force. I think their labor force size peaked actually over a decade ago. And they’re heavily dependent on manufacturing. They don’t want to let that go. They see that as the engine for the whole economy. So how do you reconcile those two factors when people don’t want those factory jobs anymore, and young people want different jobs, and there’s just not enough people to fill the factories? One solution is robots. One solution is to increasingly automate factory production to put robots of many different kinds, whether they’re your classic six-arm industrial —— – six-axis industrial robot arm —— – The classic six-armer, yep —— – that can lift up a car in one go. Or now this big push with humanoid robots is seen as being yet another potential solution, if not a perfect solution, to this ongoing labor issue. So China wants to continue to become more and more competitive, to move up the value chain and to make better and more high-value stuff. But they don’t have the work force. So A.I. and robotics is seen as the way to fill that in.