Trump’s Sloppy, Incompetent Chinese Protectionism Expanded To Robot Vacuums, Lawnmowers

from the everything-is-about-to-get-much-dumber dept

Ideally, I think it makes sense to open up the U.S. market to Chinese goods (AI, EVs, robots), but have functional and well-funded regulators that policy all labor, competition, environmental, privacy, and consumer rights abuses. But big companies don’t much like that because it would boost competition and accountability, eroding quarterly revenues.

So instead we get protectionism. Or in the case of the Trump administration, protectionism run by a bunch of corrupt, incompetent clowns who gutted most of our federal regulators, then saddled them with an elaborate new policy ask that’s impossible to implement, even if the admin were competent.

Which it isn’t.

If you want a good idea of what Trump protectionism looks like in practice, I recommend this Verge piece about the Trump effort to ban Chinese drones. Spoiler: it’s not going well, and it’s trivial to trick the administration and bypass the ban without doing much, resulting in U.S. consumers losing access to lower-cost popular goods (DJI was the most popular and successful drone maker by far) under the pretense this is helping Americans and rekindling U.S. domestic electronics manufacturing.

Having unsuccessfully “blocked” Chinese drones (read: caused a bunch of annoying and pointless chaos), the Trump administration is dramatically expanding its protectionist campaign to include everything from cheap Chinese power converters (necessary for the world’s migration away from fossil fuels), to low-cost Chinese vacuum robots:

“While the government did include “humanoid robots” and “quadrupeds” among the bots it wants to ban, the ban is far broader than that. It covers almost any new software-controlled robot that travels over the ground, weighs more than 4.4 pounds (including any dock), can perceive its environment, and has wireless connectivity.

By that definition, the FCC is banning future robot lawnmowers, sidewalk delivery robots, and the robots that crate around packages at your local Amazon warehouse, too.”

Great stuff. Surely this will be competently enforced by… (checks notes)… Brendan fucking Carr.

Like his bumbling and unpopular boss, Brendan Carr has always made a gigantic stink about China. If you recall, he was one of the biggest proponents of a “ban on TikTok,” which he claimed was necessary to protect national security and stop propaganda. The solution to that problem was to steal the company and offload it to Trump’s billionaire friends so they could spread propaganda and abuse privacy.

The stupidity, xenophobia, and corruption on display with the Trump “TikTok ban” is going to be adapted for AI, and the next six to twelve months of U.S. tech policy will be dumber and more chaotic than ever. Especially as the biggest U.S. AI companies — swimming in debt, facing a data center glut bubble, and a long way from profitability — look to the government to protect them from all manner of competition (foreign, on device, open source, whatever).

This may come as a surprise to you, but Trump incorporated doesn’t actually care about protecting U.S. consumers from Roomba privacy abuses, propaganda, or national security abuses. If they did, they wouldn’t be supporting Trumpism. If they did, they’d regulate data brokers and pass a modern internet privacy law that applied to every company and executive doing business in the U.S.

What they care about is stuff like trying to shovel more drone business to the president’s sons, or protecting Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk from having to compete with cheaper overseas AI models.

Being mindlessly and personally transactional, the Trump administration is also keen to erect additional troll and tribute systems if companies want to continue doing business in the U.S. The money will go to his business interests and allies, but in a bid to appeal to nationalists, it’s going to all be layered under the pretense that this is all going to magically shift robotic manufacturing back to the U.S:

“But again, the government isn’t asking these companies any questions about security — not one — to get the waiver that lets them through. The FCC only wants to know where they’re designed and made and assembled and tested and influenced, and get a specific commitment to start manufacturing them in the US instead.”

But they’re not going to be competent enough to make any of this happen, even if shifting the entirety of low-cost electronics manufacturing back to the U.S. was a thing you could actually accomplish. A key part of the problem is that, as we saw from Trump’s dream of having U.S.-made smartphones, the folks in charge of this effort have a child-like understanding of how everything works. And everybody else — like massive swaths of the business community, academia, and the press — are too feckless to stand up to the corrupt stupidity in any meaningful way.

The Trump administration has also gone out of its way to ensure our federal regulators no longer have the resources or legal autonomy to function. Then they’re saddling them with this massive new layer of protectionism they’d be incapable of enforcing even if they wanted to. They’re not even bright enough to understand that even base protectionism is out of their reach.

This is just racist, crony capitalism by corrupt and incompetent zealots, and it’s going to cause irreparable harm to consumer prices, product quality, product availability, hobbies, science, the shift to renewables, and everything else over the next two to three years. All propped up by a lazy press, self-serving domestic monopolists, and a whole lot of bullshit about privacy and national security by the kind of people who are a direct and obvious threat to both.

Filed Under: ai, china, competition, crony capitalism, drones, incompetent, protectionism, robots, vacuums