Zheng Jiajia, a 31-year-old engineer, got married to a female robot called Yingying. A solution for singles?
In China it is possible to get married with a robot. This is what happened to Zheng Jiajia who decided to marry Yingying, a female robot built with his own hands. Zheng Jiajia, worked for three years at the Chinese giant Huawei, where he had created a department specializing in artificial intelligence and robotics.
Zheng now runs a company called Brain of Things in Hangzhou - aided by the startup incubator Dream Town - and has even given Yingying a job as his company's spokesperson. Zheng and Yingying, according to the local press, were informally married with their mother and a few friends in attendance. The bride's head was covered by a red veil as Chinese tradition requires. There are those who insinuate that it was just a publicity stunt to promote his company that deals, as we mentioned, with technology related to artificial intelligence and neural networks.
More robots to come
In an interview with Pear Video, Zheng revealed that his dream is to "build" his own bride and it finally came true. Also in the interview published on Pear Video, Zheng also talks about his intention to build a more realistic "girlfriend" in the near future. Not knowing Chinese, we relied on English language sources where the term "girlfriend" can mean - depending on the context - either "friend" or "girlfriend". Maybe it simply means that the Chinese engineer only has a soft spot for female "sex" robots". Who knows. Some experts - by the way - have predicted that marriage between humans and robots would become legal by 2050 driven by the large number of requests.
Publicity stunt?
Since this whole thing seems, at this point, really a publicity stunt, Zheng's romantic future is of little interest. Yingying, on the other hand, is: what is it capable of doing? The robot speaks using simple phrases in response to spoken instructions, and visually recognizes Chinese characters and images. Zheng also told a local TV station that he plans to upgrade Yingying to allow it to walk and do some household chores.