Newsmaker

Reports about the world’s first-ever humanoid surrogate robot nearing completion at a robotics company in China have sparked controversy about the potential ethical implications of such a device.

On August 8th, Chinese science and technology media outlet Kuai Ke Zhi published an interview with Zhang Qifeng, a PhD at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the CEO of Kaiwa Technology, a robotics startup working on a revolutionary pregnancy robot. In it, Qifeng revealed that his company was very close to completing the world’s first humanoid pregnancy robot featuring an advanced incubation pod integrated within a robotic abdominal module. The revolutionary robot is much more than a simple incubator, with Qifeng claiming that it is capable of carrying a 10-month pregnancy and giving birth to a live baby, like a real person.

At the heart of the surrogate robot lies an artificial womb, where the implanted embryo is nurtured in amniotic fluid and supplied with nutrients through a tube connected to the umbilical cord. Qifeng claims that the artificial uterus has already shown great success in animal testing, and that the humanoid robot is expected to be released within a year, for a price of less than 100,000 yuan ($14,000).

“The artificial womb technology is already in a mature stage, and now it needs to be implanted in the robot’s abdomen so that a real person and the robot can interact to achieve pregnancy, allowing the fetus to grow inside,” Zhang Qifeng reportedly told Kuai Ke Zhi, as quoted by Chosun Daily.

Although Dr. Zhang did not provide specific information on how the eggs and sperm are fertilized and implanted in the artificial womb, his interview quickly went viral on Chinese social media, sparking heated debates among online users. Critics dubbed the technology ‘unnatural’, adding that it was cruel and unethical to deprive the fetus of a connection with its natural mother, but the idea of a humanoid surrogate robot also received a lot of support from people struggling to conceive naturally or via conventional artificial insemination, but also from those who see this technology as a way to liberate women from the constraints of pregnancy.

“If the price is only half of my annual salary, I would buy it immediately,” one person commented.

“I tried artificial insemination three times but failed all of them. Now I have a chance to have a baby,” someone else enthusiastically wrote.

Despite the online enthusiasm around the world’s first-ever humanoid pregnancy robot, medical experts have expressed skepticism about the technology’s ability to replicate critical aspects of human gestation, such as maternal hormone secretion, immune system interaction, and the neurological development that occurs during pregnancy. They emphasize that we currently don’t know very much about these processes, so artificially replicating them would be virtually impossible.