Picking tea, praying at funerals, feeding at zoos… Why China’s state-of-the-art robots are a little weird

How did you get into that line of work?

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. ……

A robot wearing a hand towel plucks tea leaves at a tremendous pace. The speed was more than twice that of a human. In no time at all, the robot had finished its work and was carrying a bamboo basket of tea leaves around its neck to the collection point.

The tea-picking robot was developed over a period of five years by Zhejiang University of Technology, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and others. The robot has learned from a vast amount of tea-picking videos, and is now able to precisely cut a single tea leaf from a branch in one to two seconds. But I wonder if tea picking is a task that should be done by state-of-the-art robots costing millions of yen per unit (……),” said a writer living in China.

China is the most advanced country in humanoid robots. The Chinese government has made “the development of physical artificial intelligence” a key issue in its “15th Five-Year Plan,” which was adopted in March.’ The humanoid robot market in 2013 amounted to 160 billion yen, and half of the physical artificial intelligence in operation worldwide was made in China. However–.

As shown in the photo above, the job given to the state-of-the-art robot is “a little weird. At funerals, they mourn the deceased while reading sutras; at zoos, they wear cute costumes and feed lemurs; and at traffic control events, they wear the same uniforms as humans. I think the AI-equipped robots of the near future will have a different role to play. …… Chinese journalist Zhou Laiyu explains.

Of course, robots are also being used in the latest businesses, such as renewable energy research. On the other hand, it is not surprising that some may ask, “Why this job? On the other hand, they are also being used in ways that might raise the question, “Why for this job? In the background, there is a 21 trillion yen fund set aside by the Chinese government to support the robotics business. Even industries that have had nothing to do with robots, such as tea farmers and funeral service companies, are starting to develop robots in order to get the hefty subsidies.

In China, flesh-and-blood humans now play a minor role, and humanoid robots can be seen everywhere. The latest technology has even been introduced to cleaning toilets and selling sundries at stalls in front of train stations. …… surrealistic scenes are becoming commonplace.

From the May 1-8, 2026 issue of FRIDAY