Bots on the ground: China leads humanoid race

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1:12Rosie Blau: Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor.

1:21Rosie Blau: Today on the show, will the meta ruling change teen social media use and a famous English language bookshop in Paris?

1:36But first...

1:52This week, the World Humanoid Robot Games took place in Beijing. These are like the Olympic Games, but instead of athletes, you have robots competing.

2:04Rosie Blau: Don Wineland is our China business and finance editor. There were some pretty impressive feats during these games. We had robots powerlifting, boxing, playing football, and of course, running. The ability to fight against the players. Wow! At one of these races, a humanoid called Tiangong Ultra beat Usain Bolt's 100m sprint record, so it was able to do this in 9.39 seconds. It ended up crashing into a wall afterwards. Other robots crashed and fell. One of them caught fire. But one thing that these Olympic Games for Robots demonstrates is that China is really at the forefront of the humanoid robotics industry.

2:54Companies in the country will probably sell around 50 ,000 of them this year. That's triple the figure of last year. But it's also worth keeping in mind that these are very expensive machines that really can't do a whole lot at this point. This technology still has a long way to go before we get robots cleaning our dishes and cooking dinner for us.

3:21Rosie Blau: Don, explain to me what's so hard about developing a useful humanoid robot. When you think about AI, we can teach chatbots how to communicate with us by scanning lots of digital texts and reading the internet and things like that. It's much more complicated when it comes to robots. Think about picking up a glass of water. You know not to squeeze a glass hard enough to make it shatter in your hand. You know how water moves around when you pick it up. These are all things you do without thinking about it. Humanoid robots need to be trained to understand all these things. They need to be able to carry out tasks safely.

4:00It's thought that we might need to collect something like 100 million hours of data from the real world in order to train robots. That's more than 11 ,000 years of data. So suffice it to say that we are really far away from collecting enough data to make humanoid robots smart.

4:21Rosie Blau: We're definitely not going to wait 11 ,000 years for these kind of humanoids. So how are robot makers planning to bridge that gap? There are a couple of different ways to do this. What's generally considered to be the highest quality data is often referred to as real-time machine data. So what you need to get this kind of data is you need a humanoid with you, and you need to make it move around because when it moves around, it records its movements, and that data can be used in other robots. Another type of data is called egocentric data. You don't need a robot with you to do this. What people do to record egocentric data is they put on headsets, and they put on gloves, sometimes suits and boots that have sensors in them, and they move around.

5:11This also records movement, and that can be applied to robotic movement as well. China's quickly becoming the frontrunner in real machine data that is acquired through these places called robot training centers. I've been trying for months to get into one of these places. No one would let me in. And finally, a colleague and I got into one in Wuhan. This place is called the Hubei Humanoid Innovation Center.

5:38Rosie Blau: So what was it like, Don? When you pull up, you know, it just looks like many of the big tech centers that are built in virtually every big city in China. When you walk in, suddenly you are in kind of a different world. The first thing I saw was a young man pouring coffee. And actually, he wasn't pouring coffee. It was the robot next to him that was pouring coffee. But he was making the hand gestures. So the robot is moving and it's learning to pour coffee. But this, of course, was just one of the many stations within this center. So if you take a few steps, you're suddenly in a small room that is designed to look like a grocery store.

6:17Then you're in a pharmacy. Then you're in a factory with a factory line in front of you. And at each station, you have one of these robot-human duos with the human training the robot how to do things, like stalking a shelf or picking up a box that has fallen on the ground or something like that.

6:40Rosie Blau: And is it working? You say China's the frontrunner. Are we actually getting closer to something that's a useful droid? China is really good at scaling things up. So if we were just looking at how well it's done in creating these training centers, it's doing very, very well. It's already built 53 of them, and it has 34 more that are being planned. The one that I went to could fit about 100 humanoids, but there's one being built in Shanghai right now that can fit 1 ,000 humanoids. We identified a city not far from Shanghai that's actually building six of these things, and it's not a big city. So in terms of creating the space and the infrastructure to do this type of training, it's doing very well.

7:22There's another side of this, which is the cost. And it's very, very expensive to run these centers. So first of all, a humanoid can cost up to$15 ,000 a piece. Then you need this training process. This costs anywhere from 500 to 700 yuan per hour. So when you start thinking about the need to get 100 million hours of training data for a useful robot to finally come into existence, you're really looking at incredible costs.

7:58Rosie Blau: So it's a very labor-intensive process. Are there other ways to get that data? So I mentioned egocentric data, getting people to put on headsets and gloves and pretend like they're working or doing real work and recording their movements. This is also taking place at a pretty wide scale in China right now. This e-commerce company called JD.com said that it's recruiting 100 ,000 of its own staff and 500 ,000 people outside of its company to put on this type of gear and record their movements. So you can see that there are companies in China that are really interested in finding other ways of collecting data.

8:40If JD is successful in this operation over the next two years, it may be able to collect 10 million hours of real world data. So that would be quite an achievement.

8:51Rosie Blau: It sounds nevertheless very slow, very expensive, with not brilliant results. Don, you said that China will sell 50 ,000 of these robots this year, but they're not very useful. Who's buying them? This is one of the key questions about the humanoid robotics industry in China. A lot of these will go to these training centers. In fact, the training centers are a key source of demand for the robots. But think about this. This is an industry that is creating robots that can't do a whole lot. And the only reason why they are being bought and sold is because there's a promise of better robots in the future.

9:33That is what's driving this industry forward right now.

9:36Rosie Blau: Don, what's the ultimate endgame here then? What are we going to use these droids for? If you want someone that can clean your house 24 hours a day and serve you food and take care of your cat or dog, we can imagine that at some point in the future, I think it's pretty far off. We might have humanoids to do that type of thing. But we have to think about this moment like maybe thinking about smartphones in the mid-2000s. You know, if somebody asked you, do you want a small TV that goes in your pocket in 1995? You might say no, right? So I guess at this point, it requires a little bit of imagination to see where this industry is going.

10:21Rosie Blau: Don, thank you very much. Thank you.

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11:32Watch HydroJug's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising-stars.

12:02Rosie Blau: by firing the head of Border Patrol and his Homeland Security advisor. Their replacements have tried to keep mass deportation out of the headlines, but they're very much continuing the policy. This week on Insider, Edward Carr, our deputy editor, gathers a panel of our top journalists to scrutinize Trump's immigration policies and asks how they will change America. And on Checks and Balance, our weekly US podcast out later today, we'll be talking specifically about the border wall. If you're a digital subscriber, Insider and Checks and Balance are already part of your subscription. If you're listening free, you can watch extended clips of Insider via the link I've put in the show notes.

12:56Rosie Blau: Outside a courthouse in California, parents spoke of their grief over how they say their lives had been ripped apart by the actions of Meta, which runs Facebook and Instagram. I don't know how they live with themselves. They have children. They don't allow their children to be on social media. I don't know how Mark Zuckerberg can live with himself knowing that his hands are bloody. With death and harm, it needs to stop. 29 states teamed up to take on the social media colossus, claiming both that the platform harmed children and that the company knew the damaging effects. But the trial lasted just five days.

13:40Rosie Blau: It was finished even before Meta's boss Mark Zuckerberg took to the stand. On Wednesday, it reached a$17 billion settlement, a landmark moment that could affect a swathe of other tech firms.

13:55Alice Fulwood: 2026 has been a pretty miserable year for Meta in court.

14:01Rosie Blau: Alice Fullwood hosts our Money Talks podcast and is The Economist's US business editor.

14:07Alice Fulwood: It lost a couple of small but very high-profile cases, but all of those cases paled in comparison to the trial that had begun on August 18th. This was brought by a consortium of 29 states. They were seeking up to$200 billion in damages and they were alleging that Meta perpetuated harm against young people and that it knew it. Now, a settlement has been reached. And what's in that settlement? There are basically sort of two main parts of the settlement. One is financial damages. So Meta has agreed to pay at least$12 billion and as much as$17 billion in damages over the next 10 years. and it's also agreed to various ways in which it will now restrict how teens and young people use Facebook and Instagram in the States.

14:57Alice Fulwood: So this includes new processes to pinpoint the age of all users. It's got to use more data and more markers to try and assess how old people are. And for everyone that it thinks is under 18, there are going to be restrictions on how much time and how they use the platform. So the total time they can spend across both of Meta's apps, Facebook and Instagram will be capped at two hours a day. There'll be a blackout period from midnight to 6am. The company is not allowed to send notifications to these users from 10pm to 7am, nor during school hours. So those are the restrictions on from a time perspective.

15:31Alice Fulwood: And then there are also some softer restrictions about what teens see. So things like how many likes a post get will be hidden from them, things that could be used for social comparison.

15:43Alice Fulwood: And from the algorithm-based feed to a 2010-style chronological feed, which will just show them photos in chronological order from accounts that they choose to follow or people that are their friends.

15:56Rosie Blau: Alice, how effective will any of that be with regard to teenagers?

16:01Alice Fulwood: You know, a lot of people are reporting the massive number from the settlement, $17 billion, oh, this is one of the biggest corporate settlements ever. And they're getting a lot of comparisons to big tobacco. and my perception is that it's just not even in the order of magnitude of the big tobacco settlement. In the 90s, the tobacco companies were fined the total size of their market cap combined. It was a$200 billion settlement against all these companies, which was roughly the value of those companies. It was absolutely enormous. Meta is being fined at maximum about 10 % of its revenue last year, about an eighth of the total amount of plans to spend on things like capex on data centers this year i think the more interesting question is these ways that meta is going to have to change its platforms to make them potentially less addictive less compulsive for teens how effective will those be and i actually think that some of the restrictions they've agreed to are pretty limiting they'll only be the sort of window in the evening where teens might be able to get notifications we'll have to see how effective their new age verification processes are and most interesting, I think, is this option to switch the feed.

17:09Alice Fulwood: We'll have to see how many teens opt into that 2010 style version of Instagram.

17:13Rosie Blau: What about the other social media companies that are also accused of these same problems with regards to teen privacy and social media addiction?

17:23Alice Fulwood: This settlement, I think you should think of it as essentially the template, the outline for how deals with other social media companies are going to be brokered. It includes a lot of trigger clauses, the fine, for example, the states will only be able to collect$12 billion unless they secure similar settlements against the other social media companies, at which point you bump up to that maximum$17 billion fine. So the states now have this incentive to go and make sure that they get similar settlements against all of these other platforms, TikTok, YouTube, Snap, etc. And a couple of the restrictions on social media will get a little bit tighter if there are settlements against other companies as well.

18:04Alice Fulwood: So the blackout period, for example, on Facebook and Instagram will run from 10pm to 7am rather than midnight to 6am if settlements are reached against other companies. So I think this is the shape of how these deals are going to look. There are probably going to be fines against the other companies. There are probably going to be these similar restrictions, the requirement to offer less addictive feeds. And the states are already getting to work on the other companies. So shortly after the settlement was announced, Pennsylvania's attorney general announced that it's suing Snapchat over the risks that its design poses to minors.

18:36Alice Fulwood: And you saw a pretty substantial slide in Snapchat price. It fell by about 8%.

18:41Rosie Blau: But this isn't the end of it, is it? This is just the US, of course, and a lot of countries are already looking at how teens are using social media.

18:49Alice Fulwood: Yeah, I mean, this obviously is the biggest case, the biggest settlement that Meta has brokered with anyone yet. That said, it really is just the tip of the iceberg. So you see Last year, Australia obviously banned young people from social media and sort of similar laws have been considered in France, although they are not going ahead at the moment. So internationally, certainly you're going to see sort of similar movements. But even in the US, like everything is not settled yet. There are still some states who are pursuing individual cases or trying to broker other settlements with Meta. And then you have all of the other kinds of lawsuits that have been filed against the companies.

19:27Alice Fulwood: So you have thousands of personal injury lawsuits have been filed, similar to the one in California. And you have more than a thousand school districts who have also sued the firm. And early trials for those kinds of cases are probably going to go ahead in February next year. So not quite a tobacco moment, but a big deal. Yeah, I think this analogy with big tobacco is very appealing in that you can see a lot of similarities. It's a potentially addictive product that is supposed to perpetuate harm to users. And the way the lawsuits have been constructed to go after social media companies have been about this question of how much did they know?

20:07Alice Fulwood: Did they know that the way that they designed these platforms were causing their users to have ill effects? Maybe they were addictive, maybe they were causing mental health issues, etc. That construction is sort of very similar to how the big tobacco cases were built. that said one of the interesting things about the tobacco settlement is that it was enormous it was considered to be sort of potentially sort of industry destroying at the time but actually although smoking rates have declined substantially the companies themselves have done very well Altria which is one of the biggest tobacco companies in the world if you'd invested in Altria in 2000 so a couple years after the settlement you would have made 36 times your money, whereas putting it in the S &P 500 would have just been about eight times.

20:49So after all

20:51Alice Fulwood: the settlements and after all that stuff was in the rearview mirror, these companies have still done fantastically well. And I do think that there may be an analogy with Meta there as well, because it's still fantastically profitable. Investors clearly don't think this is a very big deal. So potentially, it will be like big tobacco in that way. Alice, thank you very much. Thank you for having me, Rosie.

21:33The Laura Rand Shakespeare and Company, a storied English-language bookshop on the left bank of the Seine in Paris, is fascinating.

21:44Rosie Blau: Alexandra Sewitch-Bass is The Economist's culture editor. Tourists think maybe Shakespeare rode and lived there, or that Sylvia Plath founded it. The myth-telling is fascinating, and we often hear guides who are out front, in front of the bookshop, giving a completely imaginative version of the history, for example, that Sylvia Plath started this bookshop. Sylvia Whitman, the owner, has heard all the myths and theories. In fact, her father, a lover of stories, founded the shop 75 years ago this month under a different name, Le Misral. Now it is one of the most famous bookstores in the world. Two to three thousand people visit a day, about one million a year.

22:31It's appeared in many films, and people still queue to go in, even in hot weather. like we've seen this summer. George Whitman renamed his shop Shakespeare and Company after another one founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919. She had published Ulysses when everyone else thought it was obscene and was friends with famous writers such as Ernest Hemingway. Legend has it that Sylvia Beach gave him permission to adopt the name after her shop closed down. He even named his daughter Sylvia. I feel like he kind of encouraged some of those myths, especially saying that Walt Whitman was his grandfather. Although George was not always the most reliable narrator.

23:16And I always said to him, George, you can't say that, that's a lie. And he'd say, no, it is actually true, and it's true. His father was in fact called Walt Whitman. But he said, it's not my fault that they, you know, get the wrong Walt.

23:34I'm from Surrey, but I used to live in the U.S. Okay, and what brings you here today? I'm just here to check out, it's like a historic building, so we're here to check out some books. But there are other reasons for Shakespeare and Company's fame, too. It's sort of an older nostalgic vibe. I also think they have photos inside. It's kind of intrigued. You can't see what it looks like online. One is the intrigue. Photos and videos are prohibited inside, which is actually a good social media strategy because it enhances the shop's mystique. People want to see what they can't necessarily see on social media.

24:09The shop also offers a story for shoppers. Buyers are offered a stamp inside their book, which will show everyone where it came from. And it stocks luxurious hardbacks. People go in to buy classics. It also offers merchandise such as tote bags and hosts events that bring famous writers in.

24:34How easy is it to replicate Shakespeare and Company's formula? In some ways, it's an impossible playbook to copy. It has such a unique history, and its location in the center of Paris is unbeatable. But it points to a broader trend, which is that in some countries, independent bookshops are thriving. They're serving as community gathering spaces for people who want to do something with other people offline. Shakespeare and Company claims a lot of tourists as customers. Some locals complain there are too many tourists, but many bookshop owners would say that's a good problem to have.

25:23Thank you.

25:53Rosie Blau: year for the first time in 35 years, the ignobles will be held outside America. Tomorrow, Jason asks, what does the future hold for the ignobles and for science? He also makes a lot of jokes. You'll need to be a subscriber to listen. That's it for this episode of The Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jat Gill. Our deputy editor is Sarah Larniuk, and our sound designer is Will Rowe, with additional help this week from Mark Burrows. Our senior producers are Henrietta McFarlane and Alizé Jean-Baptiste. Our senior development producer is Rory Galloway. And our senior creative producer is William Warren.

26:32Rosie Blau: Our producer is Anne Hanna. And our assistant producer is Kunal Patel. With extra production help this week from Emily Elias and Eleanor Sly. We'll all see you back here for the Weekend Intelligence tomorrow.

27:19Thank you. Optimism. That's Optum. Visit Optum.com to learn more. Back to school is busy enough. The last thing you need is shopping that makes it harder. Whether you're moving into a dorm, your first apartment, or just getting organized for the semester, Wayfair makes it easy to get everything you need in one place. Furniture, bedding, storage, decor, study essentials, all at prices you'll love. with fast shipping before move-in day. Get everything you need for back-to-school season. Shop Wayfair.com today. Wayfair, every style, every home.