A Chinese tech company is building a humanoid robot that can get pregnant and give birth. It has a synthetic uterus, fake amniotic fluid, and a plastic umbilical cord. The goal is to grow a baby inside it—from embryo to delivery. No human body required.
Dr. Zhang Qifeng, CEO of Kaiwa Technology, told Kuai Ke Zhi (via Chosun Biz) that his team is close to finishing the prototype. The robot, called GEAIR, is expected to hit the market within a year, with a price tag of 100,000 yuan (around $14,000). It’s not meant to assist human pregnancy. It’s meant to replace it.
Understandably, people aren’t sure how they feel about it—myself included. It’s a mixture of excitement and complete horror. “Women have finally been liberated,” one commenter said. Another wrote, “If the price is only half my annual salary, I’d buy it immediately.”
The story blew up on Chinese social media, with some calling the tech cruel or unnatural, and others calling it progress. On Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, videos of the robot racked up thousands of comments in hours.
Scientists Say a Robot With an Artificial Womb Might Deliver a Human Baby Soon
Zhang didn’t say how the fertilization process works. He didn’t explain how the machine will handle maternal hormones, or what growing inside a plastic torso means for a baby’s brain. But those are questions for later, apparently.
Artificial wombs aren’t new. In 2017, scientists kept premature lambs alive in a sealed bag filled with synthetic fluid. The lambs grew fur. They survived. But those were lambs. This is about building humans in machines. And people are already lining up to try it.
Infertility rates in China are rising fast. Government-backed IVF programs are expanding. The demand is real. But the implications of creating life in a robot are something else entirely.
No one knows what a robot-born generation might look like. Or feel like. Or how they’ll relate to the rest of us who started in a body. What happens when your origin story starts in a lab and not in a womb? For now, it’s just a prototype. But the question is already on the table:
Are we ready to mass-produce people?
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