Don Weinland

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359 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 28 Aug

Don Weinland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Bots on the ground: China leads humanoid race · 28 Aug 2026 podcast

Finally a colleague and I got into one in Wuhan.

This place is called the Hubei Humanoid Innovation Center.

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.

Then 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.

China's 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 fifty-three of them.

And it has 34 more that are being planned.

The one that I went to could fit about a hundred humanoids, but there's one being built in Shanghai right now that can fit a thousand 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.

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