LinkerBot already has a significant price advantage in the market. Its Linker Hand products range from $600 to $15,000, depending on the number of joints and level of dexterity required. “A lot of companies can show impressive demos. Fewer can ship hands that factories can actually afford to install,” says Rui Ma, founder of the independent research firm Tech Buzz China, which recently published an article concluding that LinkerBot was the startup best positioned to become the industry standard in the short term.

Zhou has a lot of confidence in the strength of China’s manufacturing industry. In every product category, “as long as China and other countries started around the same time, China always ends up leading it—whether it’s solar panels or electric vehicles,” he says. But the challenge is figuring out how to position that less as a threat and more as an opportunity. “We are helping global robotics manufacturers lower their costs and accelerate wider adoption,” Zhou argues. To overcome long-standing skepticism about the quality of Chinese-made products, the company is offering international buyers up to a year to exchange them.

Robots Will Replace Us

Zhou says the rollout of humanoid robots will happen in three stages. First, robots will dance, greet guests, and fulfill emotional or entertainment roles, capabilities Chinese companies have already showcased extensively over the past year. Next, they’ll take on narrowly defined jobs like making drinks, cooking, and sorting packages. The final stage, he says, will be deploying them in complex environments such as the home. A robot may need to operate in hundreds of different homes, and “each one could have a completely different layout and different objects,” he says. Such varied scenarios will require robots to combine many different skill sets to finish even one small job.

One of LinkerBot’s current strategies is to tailor its hands for use in sophisticated manufacturing facilities, especially as the Chinese economy looks to upgrade its factories. The company is even using its robotic hands in its own assembly lines to make more robotic hands, demonstrating their industrial usefulness.

China has long been known for having cheap labor, but domestic manufacturers have a large appetite for automation, Shangguan says. “When I visited EV factories in China and talked to the production managers, they said even China is facing a labor shortage problem because the younger generation is less willing to work in factories,” she says. “For jobs where we can’t find workers, we also have to get robots.”

In Zhou’s vision for the future, robots will become “100 times” greater than any human and will completely replace them eventually. It's hard to imagine what such a world would look like, but Zhou says he’s not worried about the downsides. “People don’t really care whether they are unemployed; what they care about is whether they receive relief payments or welfare benefits,” he says.

Zhou predicts that by that time, AI and robots will have made goods and services so abundant that people will no longer need to work. But even in that world, he acknowledges that inequality will persist: “Someone might see online that rich people are traveling to the moon, while they themselves can only travel to Italy.”

This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.