Ryan Knutson

Our colleague Yoko Kubota was in Beijing a few months ago and visited a strange place.

So it's actually only open on the weekends and you have to book a tour.

It's very competitive to book this tour.

Yoko went to a mall, but not just any mall.

This mall was filled with robots.

It's basically an exhibition of all kinds of different robots that China has to offer.

On the first floor, you could see, for instance, household robots that can do, you know, certain types of tasks like clean the house or, you know, make coffee, et cetera.

And the other thing I guess that was personally more impressive is probably the robots that are able to sort out medicine.

Some robots that are able to conduct some dental surgery or operations.

A robot dentist?

Yeah, robot dentist, basically.

You can go to the second floor.

There they show robots that are a bit more fun.

So I saw one where a robot was wearing a Michael Jordan jersey and like shooting basketball.

There was a kind of a group of small robots that was dancing to dance music.

Kids like that one a lot.

Robots making lattes and wearing basketball jerseys might all sound a little silly.

But Yoko says people should be taking these robots more seriously because this technology is shaping up to be a new frontier in the AI arms race between the U.S.

and China.

China is really all in in the area of robotics and humanoids.