China's Robotics Dream Began in 1972

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ChinaTalk analyst yearns for the mines. He’s on a mission to visit rare earths and other critical minerals mining sites, refineries, and permanent magnet facilities around the world. If you or anyone you know can help him fulfill this mission, please reach out to aqib@chinatalk.media.Less than one in a thousand Chinese people owned private cars in the 1990s. But in 1993, a vehicle guided by a computer program landed on the floor of a car plant in Shenyang, capital of Liaoning province. Xianfeng 1 先锋1号 was the first of its kind in China, developed entirely by Chinese researchers.The car plant had previously relied on American-made autonomous-guided vehicles, but the US tightened export controls in 1991 and cut off sales to China. The plant turned to the Shenyang Institute of Automation (SIA), an institution of China’s national academy, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It was led by a scientist called Jiang Xinsong 蒋新松.Xianfeng 1. Source.To the average person today, “AI” is synonymous with chatbots — or, at least, tools that exist only in the digital realm. Hardware manifestations, like humanoid robots or intelligent Roombas, are instead considered futuristic.But “Chinese AI,” as an idea, did not necessarily begin with DeepSeek or tech companies in Hangzhou. It started on assembly lines in the Northeast, with dreams of intelligent oxygen furnaces for steel production and automated car plants. Some of the earliest champions of artificial intelligence research were not software engineers or information scientists, but those working shoulder-to-shoulder with factory worker…