Paddy Cosgrave felt like he’d travelled into the future. The Web Summit boss, on a tour of Chinese tech companies recently, couldn’t believe what he was seeing: two-legged robots, walking around an office in Hangzhou.
“China has won,” he told me in an email. “It has created an innovation system unparalleled in the history of the world. It’s unlikely the West will ever catch China in AI or robotics."
Cosgrave had just visited robot maker Unitree, one of the creative forces behind the first World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing in August, where robots participated in kickboxing, athletics, football and dance competitions.
As futuristic events go, it’s a hard one to top, though the tech workers in San Francisco are putting up a good fight, staging sellout Friday night robot boxing matches (with robots provided by Unitree and fellow Chinese company Booster Robotics).
From robots stumbling around running tracks to human referees counting down bot knockouts, there’s no shortage of clippable moments for social media here.
But all this creative muscle has a deeper impact: it fires imaginations and excitement for the future — and Europeans should learn from it.
Where’s the underground robot fight club in this part of the world? After asking around, I was told to contact Declan Shine, president of the robotics club at ETH Zurich, who is seeking sponsorship from VCs to stage a bot bout next year (should the smackdown happen, I hope to be ringside).
“Europe is lacking significantly right now on humanoids,” says Shine. “China has quite a headstart with its incredible supply chains.”
China’s warning
To be clear, there are European startups making progress on humanoids, including the aptly-named London-based Humanoid — just not at the pace of China or the US.
Europe’s most advanced humanoid maker left the continent: Norway-born 1X, which is creating a robot butler called Neo, has moved its headquarters to Palo Alto.
Founder Bernt Børnich effortlessly channels Silicon Valley with his grandiose talk of delivering 1m robots by 2028 (Neo deliveries start in 2026). I don’t have full faith in these forecasts but, much like Elon Musk’s bluster about colonising the moon, these stories are useful for fundraising and inspiring tech heads.
1X was clearly drawn to the US by the promise of better funding, though Shine doesn’t feel any American robot effort — which he calls “super expensive research projects” — currently has the cost advantage of Chinese robots.
Here’s a key detail: China-based supply chains produce robots at a third of the cost of non-China suppliers, according to estimates from US investment bank Morgan Stanley.
The warning for the world is that China keeps beating the odds when it comes to turbocharged advances. Some investors recently told Bloomberg that the country’s dominance has made key sectors — like batteries and clean energy technology — uninvestable in the west.
Europe’s wakeup call
So should European robot makers be worried about getting outran and outpunched?
Admittedly, humanoids don’t feel imminent: there’s a big gap between robots sort-of slugging it out in a cage and reliably handling household tasks. The fear of one of these robots falling on a child, specifically, is enough for parents to ban them for the foreseeable.
Nor are humanoids the only robot game in town: plenty of European startups are developing non-human-looking — though still extremely useful — bots for warehouses, factories and building sites.
But Europe should also get real about China’s tech lead, says Cosgrave. The lesson he took home from his trip was “not that Europe needs better startups: [it] needs a better innovation system.
“Without radical and sweeping change, the gap over the coming decade between Chinese and European startups and economy-wide innovation more broadly is going to explode in China’s favour,” he says.
This is a wakeup-call-moment, agrees Shine. “Europe’s decisionmakers should decide now if it makes sense to support our own industry or in 50 years we’ll be asking: why are all our robots made in China?”
To keep pace with bot development, Europe will need to do lots of things, from improving university tech transfer to bolstering supply chains.
My modest proposal for tech companies: they should organise robot competitions. Because the first rule of robot fight club is that people will talk about it — and excitement (and investment) will surely follow.
