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A recent drone show in China caught Western media attention, as over 10,000 drones flew in perfect synchronization, demonstrating China’s technological progress. As the video racked up millions of views on social media, popular reactions were a mix of fear, awe and disbelief.
For the first time since World War II, the U.S. is finding itself at a technological disadvantage, albeit in a narrow but important field of technology: robotics, drones and AI. This sudden reversal signals more than just a shift in innovation; it heralds a new era where China, not the West, may dictate the future of technology. It is worth taking a moment to look at how geopolitical conditions and strategy have created the perfect storm of Chinese technological ascendence in the field of robotics.
Chinese manufacturer DJI is dominating the drone market by sales volume, accounting for over 75% of all drone sales, with Intel in a distant second place with 4% market share, according to Statista.
Additionally, the Chinese industrial robotic fleet first caught up to the U.S. back in 2015, and has been growing at an extraordinary rate since then. Today, it is estimated that over 40% of the world’s robots are in China, and according to the International Federation of Robotics more than half of all new industrial robots are installed in China each year.
The Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University also found that China is leading in new AI patents. In 2022, they report, more than 60% of all new AI patents originated in China, while the U.S. only accounted for about 20%, down from 54% in 2010.
This seismic shift isn’t just about robots in factories or drones in the sky. It’s about who will shape the fundamental ways we live, work, and interact in the coming decades.
But this new technology is not without its weaknesses. A recent drone show in Hong Kong, on the eve of China’s 75th anniversary, was canceled due to bad weather on the sun. Ionospheric interference made the GPS too unreliable to safely conduct the drone show, so the fleet of 2099 drones were grounded.
This time the interference was natural, but the conflict in Ukraine has shown how vulnerable our satellite based positioning systems are to tampering. The GPS is an aging system, not fit for purpose in modern economies and towering Asian cities.
Hong Kong in particular seems especially aware of this reality, aggressively funding and supporting research and development in the field of spatial computing — or the art of teaching machines to understand the physical world.
At Europe’s largest spatial computing conference later this year, Hong Kong is the largest sponsor, outbidding even Meta for the opportunity to be top-of-mind within the industry. As someone active in the industry, and Hong Kong, I think it is only natural for Hong Kong to take a leading role in the future of spatial computing and smart cities.
By the scale of this century, one could argue that there are no truly large cities in the West. New York, the greatest city of the western hemisphere, boasts over 900 buildings taller than 100 meters — while Hong Kong has over 4,000.
The Greater Bay Area is the world’s largest settlement in all but name.
Zooming out, you can see from space that the Greater Bay Area is a contiguous urban area that, despite being smaller than Greater Los Angeles, is home to a staggering 87 million people and more high-rise buildings than all of North America and Europe combined.
The complexity and density of these modern Asian cities is driving both the requirements and viability of drones, AI, robots and automated work in general. It should come as no surprise that Chinese and Asian universities are prolific contributors to the state of spatial computing when infrastructure like global positioning satellites work so poorly in these modern, dense environments.
On a recent podcast with Lex Fridman, Elon Musk of Tesla and xAI explained how AI supremacy will boil down to who has the greatest compute resources and who has the best access to training data. He explained that humanity has so far only produced a relatively small amount of data for AI to train on, but that “reality scales”, meaning that future AI models will be trained on data derived from digitally observing the real world.
Ultimately, it is more valuable to have an AI that knows how to assemble furniture, pour a glass of water or drive a car, and that behavior can be better observed in reality rather than from written materials online. This is why Elon made the claim that Tesla’s Optimus robot will be the largest source of data in the world, rather than emphasizing the data it will consume.
This is yet another field where China has already created a large moat, with an enormous amount of the world’s cumulative AI and machine perception research coming either from Chinese universities or Chinese nationals.
Looking ahead, it is easy to see how the gap may widen much further, as access to training data is turning out to be perhaps the most determining factor in who will win the AI race. Unless there’s a radical change in geopolitical circumstances or Western strategy, we may be witnessing the early stages of a Chinese-led technological future.
Recently, Beijing announced an ambitious three-year plan to further accelerate their AI dominance. This is likely being driven by several factors, like the unparalleled growth of Asian cities, and China’s often-discussed aging population. Sometimes described as a looming demographic collapse by its global competitors, with its roots in the previous one-child policy, China is facing a rapidly shrinking workforce. China’s investments into AI, robotics, spatial computing and infrastructure is a calculated response both to its past, its current realities, and their vision of the future.
Perhaps in the fullness of time we will see that the one-child policy, rapid urbanization and the disciplined focus on technology converged to lead to one of the most significant role reversals on the global stage in history. China has already taken a significant lead, and it has only just begun.
Auki is building the posemesh, a decentralized machine perception network for the next 100 billion people, devices and AI on Earth and beyond. The posemesh is an external and collaborative sense of space that machines and AI can use to understand the physical world.
Our mission is to improve civilization’s intercognitive capacity; our ability to think, experience and solve problems together with each other and AI. The greatest way to extend human reach is to collaborate with others. We are building consciousness-expanding technology to reduce the friction of communication and bridge minds.
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The Posemesh is an open-source protocol that powers a decentralized, blockchain-based spatial computing network.
The Posemesh is designed for a future where spatial computing is both collaborative and privacy-preserving. It limits any organization's surveillance capabilities and encourages sovereign ownership of private maps of personal and public spaces.
The decentralization also offers a competitive advantage, especially in shared spatial computing sessions, AR for example, where low latency is crucial. The posemesh is the next step in the decentralization movement, responding as an antidote to the growing power of big tech.
The Posemesh has tasked Auki Labs with developing the software infrastructure of the posemesh.
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