UK Has Lowest Robot Density in G7 – And No Plan for What Comes Next
China just hosted 2,056 robots at the World Humanoid Robot Games; one broke the 100m world record. Britain has the lowest robot density in the G7, ranks 24th globally, and has no plan for who controls the automation revolution. The robots are coming. The question is who decides what they take.
Watch enough of the footage from Beijing this week and you will see a machine draw a bow and loose an arrow with proper form, another return serve after serve on a tennis court with nobody holding its strings, and a third, built by the firm Unitree and nicknamed Superman, sprint down a training track faster than any human alive before it forgets how to stop, hits a wall, and folds itself in half in a shower of sparks. The clip of that crash has now reportedly been watched more than thirteen million times, and it is genuinely funny. The video carrying it round the internet is not content with the joke for long. It ends, as these things increasingly do, on a darker note: ranks of machines marching in formation, a suggestion of what comes after the sport stops being sport.
That ending is speculation. The Games in Beijing are not. The second World Humanoid Robot Games opened at the city’s Ice Ribbon arena on Saturday, and it is a serious undertaking dressed as a circus: six hundred and sixty six teams and more than two thousand machines from sixteen countries, competing across thirty sporting events and twenty one real-world challenges, from football and kickboxing to sorting hospital medicines and folding laundry in a mock hotel room. China is not staging this for entertainment. The International Federation of Robotics puts the country’s operational stock of industrial robots at around two million units, the largest in the world, and Chinese buyers accounted for fifty four per cent of every industrial robot installed globally in 2024. In January last year the Bank of China alone committed a trillion yuan, something over one hundred billion pounds, to domestic chip and artificial intelligence investment. Beijing has already decided that it will build the industry that supplies humanoid labour, the way it built the industries that supply the world’s solar panels and batteries.
No robot marched with a rifle this week, and the fear that one soon will is the least of it. The threat that should trouble you is quieter and much nearer than an army of machines. It is the question of who owns the machine that can stack a shelf, fold a shirt, or work a factory floor, and on what terms it puts a human being out of a job.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, published last January, forecast that robots and automation alone will displace five million more jobs worldwide than they create by 2030. Britain enters that contest from near the back of the field. Industrial robot density here stands at roughly a hundred units for every ten thousand workers, the lowest of any G7 economy and twenty fourth in the world, and the manufacturers’ body Make UK reckons the country is forfeiting up to one hundred and fifty billion pounds of growth by 2035 for the privilege. The current government’s Modern Industrial Strategy has found four point three billion pounds for advanced manufacturing over five years, with two point eight billion of that for automation research. It is a serious sum by the standards of a Westminster spending round. It is not a serious sum by the standards of the country it is meant to be competing with.
On his first day as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham promised to “build a new economy where we put life’s essentials back under stronger public control.” It was a Bennite sentence, and a welcome one. But essentials do not stop at energy and water. If the work that pays the mortgage is itself about to be automated at scale, the question of who controls that transition, and who profits from it, belongs in the same sentence. So far it has not been asked.
One answer that keeps returning to the table is a basic income, severed from work and paid as of right. Wales tried the mildest possible version of the idea: a monthly payment of sixteen hundred pounds to just six hundred and thirty five care leavers. Even that pilot was allowed to lapse in 2025, a decision explained at the time by cost, with its full evaluation not due until 2027. If a government cannot find the will to fund a basic income for a few hundred of the most vulnerable young people in the country, it is fair to ask what appetite exists for anything larger once the machines now sprinting round a stadium in Beijing start turning up in British warehouses and care homes.
Every dystopian film ends the same way, with the machines ascendant and the humans who built them written out of the story. That ending is a warning, not a prophecy, and warnings exist to be heeded rather than enjoyed. The robots are coming whether Westminster plans for them or not. The only choice left to a democracy is whether working people have a seat at the table when the terms are set, or whether they find out, as they always have before, after the decision has already been made.
Sarah Connor said it best, in Terminator 2: Judgment Day: “The future’s not set. There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.” Britain, for now, isn’t making anything.
