A robotics entrepreneur says his company is nearing completion of a “pregnancy robot,” with a prototype to be ready for sale as early as next year.
“Some people don’t want to get married but still want a ‘wife’; some don’t want to be pregnant but still want a child. So one function of our ‘robot wife’ is that it can carry a pregnancy,” said Zhang Qifeng, founder of Guangzhou-based Kaiwa Technology.
Why It Matters
China has invested heavily in robotics. The country is a leader in industrial robots per capita and has just hosted the first “World Humanoid Robot Games” in Beijing.
The push aims to prepare for a shrinking workforce as China becomes a super-aged society. In recent years, it has faced a flagging birth rate, as economic concerns and changing social attitudes push women to have children later than ever—or not at all.
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Infertility has also risen, to 18 percent in 2020 from 12 percent in 2007, according to a report published by the medical journal The Lancet, with one out of every 5.6 couples of childbearing age facing difficulties conceiving.
Newsweek reached out to the Chinese foreign ministry by email with a request for comment.
What To Know
Surrogacy is illegal in China, but Zhang—who holds a Ph.D. from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore—hopes to work around the ban with robots.
“We want to integrate a gestation chamber into a humanoid robot and build an artificial womb so it can carry a full-term pregnancy ‘in