The Shape of the Human: Making the Humanoid Robot in China

Abstract

The human shape is the wrong shape for building a robot. Humanoid robots have a high center of mass that reduces stability; they are unreliable, excessive, and expensive. This was once the consensus. Yet starting in 2023, businesses, research laboratories, and government agencies in China began investing substantial capital and resources in efforts to build robots in human shape. Sustaining this project of building a humanoid robot – keeping it legible and legitimate – requires significant discursive work. It is precisely this discursive work, necessary to maintain and naturalize the ambition of humanoid robotics, that this dissertation examines. The dissertation analyzes the spaces, timelines, socioeconomic constructs, and biological language through which the project of building robots in human form is sustained in China, and through which certain aspects of the human are constructed and constrained. The state and corporate discourses for the humanoid robotics project were prominently on display at the numerous academic and industry conferences, forums, and related events that took place in 2023-2024 in China, and that became the main material for my research. This was supplemented by online conferences, company tours, audited classes, formal and informal interviews with the representatives of the industry and academia. The field work done in 2023-2024 was supported and informed by the field trips and work that has been done since 2017. This dissertation focuses on the discursive work it takes to construct and sustain the humanoid robotics project. Chapter 1 examines how, because of its human form, the humanoid robot can be understood both as a longstanding human dream and as a national ambition. Chapter 2 looks at the humanoid robot as a special object, highly visible and signifiable entity. Chapter 3 analyzes what socio-economic ideas the project falls back on to justify the use of humanoid robots. Chapter 4 examines how biological language is used to frame the project. As such, the four chapters each look at the discursive work done to sustain the humanoid project through four distinct angles: combination of global and national, symbolic, socio-economic, and biological.