US Robotics Companies Push For National Strategy To Compete With China (apnews.com) 50
U.S. robotics companies, including Tesla and Boston Dynamics, are urging lawmakers to establish a national robotics strategy to keep pace with China's aggressive investment in AI-driven robotics. The Associated Press reports: Jeff Cardenas, co-founder and CEO of humanoid startup Apptronik, of Austin, Texas, pointed out to lawmakers that it was American carmaker General Motors that deployed the first industrial robot at a New Jersey assembly plant in 1961. But the U.S. then ceded its early lead to Japan, which remains a powerhouse of industrial robotics, along with Europe. The next robotics race will be powered by artificial intelligence and will be "anybody's to win," Cardenas said in an interview after the closed-door meeting. "I think the U.S. has a great chance of winning. We're leading in AI, and I think we're building some of the best robots in the world. But we need a national strategy if we're going to continue to build and stay ahead."
The Association for Advancing Automation said a national strategy would help U.S. companies scale production and drive the adoption of robots as the "physical manifestation" of AI. The group made it clear that China and several other countries already have a plan in place. Without that leadership, "the U.S. will not only lose the robotics race but also the AI race," the association said in a statement. The group also suggested tax incentives to help drive adoption, along with federally-funded training programs and funding for both academic research and commercial innovation. A new federal robotics office, the association argued, is necessary partly because of "the increasing global competition in the space" as well as the "growing sophistication" of the technology.
The Association for Advancing Automation said a national strategy would help U.S. companies scale production and drive the adoption of robots as the "physical manifestation" of AI. The group made it clear that China and several other countries already have a plan in place. Without that leadership, "the U.S. will not only lose the robotics race but also the AI race," the association said in a statement. The group also suggested tax incentives to help drive adoption, along with federally-funded training programs and funding for both academic research and commercial innovation. A new federal robotics office, the association argued, is necessary partly because of "the increasing global competition in the space" as well as the "growing sophistication" of the technology.
US Robotics? (Score:5, Funny)
I thought this article was going to promote the Sportster X2 over those Chinese Zoom v32bis modems!
Re: US Robotics? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Damn! Beat me to it. RJ-11 anyone?
Can we get the XJack back? (Score:2)
I was thinking we could see the XJack make a comeback. That would really be awesome for laptops.
Re: (Score:2)
Except that the copper lines are now disabled by the telcos all over the world.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I too was excited by how the headline started, and disappointed by the way it finished.
Been a long time since a modem was headline news on slashdot.
Re: (Score:2)
I too was excited by how the headline started, and disappointed by the way it finished.
I'm having trouble reconciling that, in a good way, with your username... :-)
Re: US Robotics? (Score:2)
Here for the 56K, all the way!!
BBS are making a comeback fwiw and thereâ(TM)s a whole new community finding the Commodore 64 and similar 8 bit machines.
Thereâ(TM)s no viruses nor.data stealers there!!
Re: (Score:3)
Came here for the modem jokes; was not disappointed.
Re: (Score:2)
Kicking myself as to why my brain didn't think of that.
My US Robotics modem can still compete with China (Score:2)
Re: My US Robotics modem can still compete with Ch (Score:2)
So to translate (Score:5, Informative)
Fun fact if you make $50,000 a year you pay about $50 a year in taxes for food stamps and direct welfare payments. You pay about $4,000 a year for corporate welfare. Funny that we hear about the former so very much more than the latter.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because we're forced to. Ask anyone about welfare and food stamps and they'll ask why they are subsidizing lazy people and how they need to get off their a**es. (Ignoring the fact most of those people are working, and if not, can't work - either due to disability, conv
Re: So to translate (Score:2)
I do think that there is a very valid discussion to have about corporate welfare.
Unfortunately the party that considered themselves the flag bearer on corporate welfare ceded the high ground by importing millions of immigrants and giving them hotels and food all the while completely ignoring hurricane victims. And they kneeled at the feet of the oligarchs to gather the gold coins.
Someone really needs to switch off their brain to not see thereâ(TM)s something wrong with that!. Maybe itâ(TM)s one of
You're a straw manning (Score:2)
As for immigration there's nothing wrong with it if we're all getting a piece of action. The problem is we bring in fuck tons of immigrants and they generate tons of money and it all goes to the top and we just lose our jobs.
You fixed that with a federal jobs guarantee. And I mean good jobs. Real jobs. You bring the skills and the government brings the work. If the job creators
Re: (Score:2)
Look at how China does it. It's not free money like it is in some Western countries, it's two things.
1. Government sets a strategic goal and supports companies working towards it. Because the government isn't subject to changing political whims every few years, investing in its goals is low risk and often high reward.
2. Cheap loans. Governments can borrow money at lower cost than anyone else. And even outside of the government loans, companies working in government backed areas attract a lot of investment a
Re: (Score:2)
This is so true. The biggest thing that China is doing is focusing on long-term goals. Things that take decades to accomplish: moving people from an agrarian to city life -check, building a strong manufacturing industry -check, education -check, investing in foreign countries to build alliances -check, etc.
The only things we are focusing on long-term is fighting with ourselves. Businesses focus on quarterly results to pump stock prices. Politicians face re-election every few years, and put all their ef
Re: (Score:2)
Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Fun fact if you make $50,000 a year you pay about $50 a year in taxes for food stamps and direct welfare payments. You pay about $4,000 a year for corporate welfare. Funny that we hear about the former so very much more than the latter.
Yup. This is literally another industry screaming and crying and saying that if the government doesn't hand over gobs of cash they'll fall on their face. And the worst part is, businesses just threaten to walk away altogether if they don't get giant piles of cash from the government, and our government will cave every god damned time.
Re: So to translate (Score:2)
With national debt interest at like 70% of taxes collected, you are about to see the entire point of government transition to taking from workers and reallocating to investors holding the debt. Yes, debt the young workers did not take out for investments young investors did not make. What did they get for it? GWB with a mission accomplished sign and codpiece, and a banker bailout.
But will they let Trump wet his beak (Score:2)
Over the years, Republicans and Trump already gave world dominance in solar panels, wind turbines, and now electric cars to China. I'm sure for the few billion some Chinese whales put into $TRUMP, they will get robotics.
Re:But will they let Trump wet his beak (Score:4)
To all the fans of the China method, take a hard look at Russia. The systems arent identical but I was Chinese I would be very worried about the similarities.
There are some limited times where the free market fails to meet a need or lacks the vision to do something important, and that’s where industrial policy is needed. But most of the time, the gubbermint simply gets it wrong. Let the free market do it’s magic. Unfortunately, that’s a very unpopular opinion nowadays.
Re: (Score:2)
Let the free market do its magic? You mean like how it ignored all the damage to environment until we had to spend enormous sums of money to fix it, and it still isn't fixed? Or how about the Great Recession when Bush II thought it just potty to let the SEC stop regulating and it wound up costing the U.S. Treasury a lot of money? Or the failure of the government to enforce vaccinations so that now we stand the risk of measles fucking up a generation of kids?
Re the last, RFK Jr. thought it a good idea to cla
Robotics are important... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ages ago when I was working with a group on a business plan to make a storage silo that didn't use tape, but bare hard drives to move between reading areas and storage bays... at the time, the only robotics company that was able to do what was needed was Siemens. At the time (~10 years ago), nobody else had the precision to move around bare hard disks, because there isn't any easy gripping surface unless one wanted to mount a sled or tray to them (or an enclosure like the RDX format.) The research and prototyping was interesting, and likely something could have come up with it.
We have lost a lot of mechanical expertise. Current companies can't even make a cassette tape player that comes close to a Sony Walkman player made decades ago in terms of size and features. We need robotics companies... and a return to having more mechanical engineering expertise so we can do things like 400 CD autochangers or floppy drives, should a shift happen which makes customers move to offline media. Currently, it would be a major undertaking to do basic stuff that was commonplace in the 1990s.
Re: (Score:2)
Fake News (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Except that Elmo does not care about the press. As long as he gets his government contracts, he's fat and happy. The little people? His attitude is they deserve to be screwed for being little.
Strategy (Score:2)
Make a better fucking robot than them, without denying them access to markets. How about that? We have the smartest people in the world, maybe we should act like it instead of being insecure? And if we don't have the smartest roboticists, then we'll figure out some other shit to do. Any strategy we take must be the one that best advances the field of robotics for the benefit of Americans and actually, fuck it, all humanity too. I don't expect us to learn. We'll do tariffs, we'll do "protectionism", we'll do
Competing economic systems (Score:3)
If the current system is being out-competed by other economic systems, then change the system. An economic system is just a utility, it isn't something we should have an emotional investment in like a sports team.
How to start? China's five and ten year plans seem to be working pretty well. Worth a try.
What does it mean to "win' robotics? (Score:3)
I'm curious about this. What would it mean to "win"? That the majority of industrial robots are designed in the US? By engineers based in the US? Do they need to be built here? Or sold here? Do the companies making robots need US headquarters?
Then coms the economic question. So we encourage US companies to invest in robot design and production. What do we give up to achieve that? Should we stop having engineers work on data storage systems? AI? EVs? Batteries? Cars? Medical equipment? There's only a limited supply of engineers and capital. To work on one thing, you have to give up working on something else. People encouraging supporting one industry universally forget this tradeoff.
The first law of economics is there isn't enough of everything to satisfy every desire. The first law of politics is to ignore the first law of economics.
Re: (Score:2)
"Winning robotics" means a bunch of money coming into the industry for the captains to skim off. It doesn't have anything to do with robots.
Also, I don't think a coherent "national strategy" is possible on anything right now, unless it's a social media blitz, or scrubbing pictures of negroes.
Re: (Score:2)
No, I take that back. A coherent strategy is possible for fraud as well. But for robots? For building anything? No.
Re: (Score:2)
There is likely to be a very big new market for capable humanoid robots. The technology is beyond us at the moment. As impressive as Boston Dynamics and some of the Chinese robots are, they need a lot better AI to be able to perform general tasks.
Optimus is still struggling with the basics that others sorted out a decade ago.
The other big market for new robots will be vehicles. Jobs like truck and taxi driver will probably largely go away in the next decade or two. Only really Waymo is competitive in that a
Re: (Score:2)
There is likely to be a very big new market for capable humanoid robots...
No doubt. Robots are getting better and better quite fast. But that doesn't address my question.
Do these robots need to be designed in the US? By US citizens? Do the companies need to be headquartered or mostly staffed in the US? Is it OK to have US headquartered companies get only 60% of the revenue or does it have to be 100%? Does this include traditional industrial robots? Advanced CNCs? Do we only care about Data and C-3PO?
I don't think there's clear answers for any of this. I also don't think there's
Kinda funny how... (Score:5, Insightful)
US companies when the government regulates their industry: "You should not interfere with the free market!"
US companies when there is competition from another country: "You have to interfere with the free market!"
First steps (Score:4, Interesting)
The very first step is to get the US education system fixed.
We are not going to compete in the realm of technology if we're graduating students who can't even read or do basic math.
This nation needs to realize that prioritizing athletes, celebrities and actors who have zero skill sets other than crying on cue
or running up and down a court / field while kicking / throwing / hitting / catching various sized balls aren't going to keep us
competitive on the World stage when it comes to anything that matters.
Re: (Score:2)
We also need to show that STEM has a future. What are kids going to do when they see that any computer job means they are out of work for months to years, perhaps career ending when something happens in the economy? Telling kids to go to law school isn't going to keep the US competitive. More MBAs means more boatswain cracking whips, but not enough rowers and sailors. Sports? Maybe a fraction of a percent actually make it to something lucrative that pays the bills. Music? The days of an A&R liste
same old same old (Score:2)
This is a rerun of 1978, when the bogeyman was Japan. Guess what? US lost. What are the chances the US will be smarter this time?