Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Shocking New Findings on How Corporate America Keeps Strengthening China’s Military

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AI, artificial intelligence, Biden adminisration, Center for Security and Emerging Technology, China, export controls, Georgetown University, innovation, Intel, investment, national security, Nvidia, Orbcomm, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, semiconductors, Silicon Valley, software, tech, venture capital, Xilinx

Recent weeks have seen an impressive burst of new information about how U.S.-owned businesses are fueling the technological and military strength of China, a country whose armed forces American soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women could be fighting on the battlefield before too long.

The first source of this information comes from Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) in an October report called Harnessed Lightning: How the Chinese Military is Adopting Artificial Intelligence.

The study focuses on China’s own efforts to develop artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and incorporate them into its military operations and systems, and goes into fascinating detail about how much money is spent on these efforts, and how many Chinese entities of all kinds are involved in the campaign. The authors also make clear – just in case it wasn’t screamingly obvious already – how widespread these applications can be, and their incredible potential to revolutionize warfare and hand victory to the power possessing the best knowhow.

But as one of the team explained in a summary magazine article two days ago:

“Our research also highlights that U.S. companies are inadvertently powering Chinese military advances in AI. The overwhelming majority of advanced computer chips at the heart of China’s military AI systems are designed by U.S. firms like Intel, NVIDIA and Xilinx, and manufactured in Taiwan. We found that suppliers actually depicted NVIDIA-branded processors in photos of their products, providing clear evidence of the role U.S. technology plays in powering China’s advances. One company, which won a contract to supply chips for the PLA Strategic Support Force, even bought the domain ‘nvidiagpu.com.'”

Moreover, much more than simply semiconductors are involved. So is machine-learning and intelligent text-processing software, along with systems for “real-time monitoring” of “millions of global shipping and related users” with the help of 108 satellites from the American company Orbcomm.

My only objection: It’s inconceivable that these U.S. firms don’t fully understand the national security implications of their activities. The report itself notes that

“Because most institutions that supply AI-related equipment are new and not subject to end-use controls, the Chinese military is frequently able to access or acquire technology from abroad, including from the United States. Some Chinese suppliers make a business out of sourcing foreign data or components and reselling them to sanctioned Chinese defense companies or PLA [People’s Liberation Army] units.”

But the U.S. businesses must be aware that any of their products sold to any Chinese entity are going to be made available to the Chinese military simply because that’s the way China has operated since the Communists have been running the place. So this rationale can be easily laughed off.

The same cynical reaction is justified for claims that U.S.-owned firms don’t know that the capital they’re steering into the Chinese tech sector will also benefit the Chinese military. And these capital flows are both impressive and coming both from finance companies and from the huge semiconductor manufacturer Intel – which is hoping to receive billions in U.S. government subsidies and tax breaks to help restore its competitiveness in microchip production largely (of course) to bolster national security.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal this morning, Intel is “is among the active investors, backing a Chinese company now called Primarius Technologies Co., which specializes in chip-design tools that U.S. companies currently lead in making.” RealityChek regulars, moreover, know that Intel has been investing in other defense-related Chinese entities for years.

Not that American investment firms aren’t also doing their part to strengthen China’s tech prowess and therefore military capability and potential. Including the Intel deal, the Journal found, American companies “participated in 58 investment deals in China’s semiconductor industry from 2017 through 2020, more than double the number from the prior four years….”

And on top of these transactions, according to the Journal, “the China-based affiliates of Silicon Valley venture firms Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Redpoint Ventures have made at least 67 investments in Chinese chip-sector companies since the start of 2020….” In all, the sums involve run into the billions.

And in case you still doubt that these U.S. firms fully understand how valuable their investments are to a country that’s increasingly hostile to America, the Journal article quotes the head of one of these Chinese recipients as saying that his operation is working with the Chinese regime and other partners “to help our country get rid of its dependence on foreign high-performance chips.” Since the United States is still ahead in this sector, a China that no longer relies on American high tech products is going to be a China that’s caught up – and possibly grabbed the lead.

What’s the U.S. government doing about this dangerously unacceptable situation? It’s true that Washington has long maintained a system of export controls aimed at preventing China and other worrisome countries access to critical, militarily relevant goods and knowhow. But as the CSET study documents, this system is being completely overwhelmed – in part because of sorely inadequate funding and staffing, and in part because it’s never switched from a case-by-case approach to the kind of much broader denial strategy that’s clearly needed for a systemic threat like that posed by China.

There’s legislation in the works to plug some of the holes, and according to the Journal, the Biden administration seems supportive. Let’s just hope that the government gets its act together sometime before weapons powered by American technology and funded by American investors start killing American servicemen and women somewhere in East Asia.

BTW, thanks to friend Bill Holstein for calling my attention to these two items. 

 

Those Stubborn Facts: How the U.S. Lost the Global Semiconductor Manufacturing Tech Lead

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capex, capital spending, China, infotech, innovation, Intel, investment, manufacturing, microchips, national security, Samsung, semiconductors, South Korea, Taiwan, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, tech, Those Stubborn Facts

“North America-” (i.e., U.S.-) Owned Firms’ Share of Global Semiconductor Capital Spending, 1990: 31 percent

“North America-” (i.e., U.S.-) Owned Firms’ Share of Global Semiconductor Capital Spending, 2019: 28 percent

“Asia-Pac/Others*- Owned Firms’ Share of Global Semiconductor Capital Spending, 1990: 10 percent

“Asia-Pac/Others*-Owned Firms’ Share of Global Semiconductor Capital Spending, 2019: 63 percent

*Excludes Japan. Includes Taiwan, South Korea, and China

(Source: “A Path to Success for the EU Semiconductor Industry,” by Michael Alexander and Thomas Kirschstein, Roland Berger, February 12, 2021, https://www.rolandberger.com/en/Insights/Publications/A-path-to-success-for-the-EU-semiconductor-industry.html)

Im-Politic: The U.S. Still Isn’t Even Running in the Global Semiconductor Supremacy Race

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appropriations, authorization, Chuck Schumer, Congress, Defense Department, House of Representatives, Im-Politic, innovation, Intel, microchips, semiconductors, Senate, subsidies, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, technology, TSMC

In a week, the United States will mark an anniversary that no American should want to celebrate: It was last June 10 and 11 that companion bills were introduced in both the House and Senate to increase greatly the U.S. government’s support for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Since I’m a strong backer of such efforts, why am I so downbeat? Because despite the importance of strengthening the American footprint in this sector for both national security and future prosperity, and despite seemingly strong bipartisan support for this effort (at least in principle) nearly a year later, not a single penny has been been spent.

It would actually be reasonable to argue that the federal government took way too long to take even that preliminary step. After all, as I documented in this article last October, America’s global leadership in producing (as opposed to designing) the microchips increasingly crucial to so many defense-related and civilian products and services – and indeed, entire industries – had been waning for decades, and was finally lost in 2017. That’s the year when U.S.-owned Intel became unable to keep up with Taiwan’s Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in turning out semiconductors featuring the world’s smallest circuit sizes – the main indicator of a chip’s capabilities.

So it’s not terribly impressive that American political leaders took two years to begin responding in a serious way. (And P.S. – the executive branch, under President Trump, clearly wasn’t johnny-on-the-spot, either, in using the bully pulpit to sound the alarm and generate support for action.)

Still, the bipartisan nature of the legislative effort – at a time of heated partisanship on virtually every other national issue – seemed cause for encouragement. Even better: Just a month later, the House and Senate passed their respective semiconductor bills.

Since then, however, progress has been sluggish. The Representatives and Senators didn’t manage to get their acts together before that session of Congress ended in order to draft and pass the consensus bill needed to go to the President’s desk for signing. Therefore, the measures died, and work needed to begin all over again this past January, when the new Congress convened.

Semiconductor work was proceeding along another track in late 2020, and resulted in key provisions of the expired bill being incorporated into legislation authorizing the Defense Department’s levels and kinds of spending for this fiscal year. That bill became law this New Year’s Day (over a Trump veto for unrelated reasons), but according to Congress’ procedures, authorizing bills can’t trigger any spending. That requires an appropriations bill – which also must be passed in identical form by both chambers before enactment.

Six months later, there’s still no money flowing. The story is excrutiatingly difficult to follow, but it appears that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York tried to speed up the process in May with an emergency funding measure. Passage seemed likely at month’s end, before the Senate’s scheduled Memorial Day recess, but was stymied at the last minute by a sadly typical array of political shenanigans from both the minority Republicans (whose support was needed because of the Senate’s filibuster provision requiring super-majorities to pass most legislation) and Democrats. (See here and here for good accounts.)

Passage of a similar measure by the House looks to be easier, because of the Democrats’ slightly bigger majority. But there the process is less advanced, since the House Democrats’ own technological competitiveness proposals were only introduced in committee May 25.

It’s not like the U.S. private sector has been standing still. Intel, most significantly, seems determined to reemphasize manufacturing again, and has committed to put lots of money where it’s mouth is. But without a major helping hand from Washington, this campaign is sure to be swamped by the massive amounts of foreign government subsidies for promoting advanced semiconductor manufacturing that have been announced lately. (Here’s a useful summary.)

I’m generally a fan of the cautious approach to policymaking fostered by the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers and checks and balances principles. And I wouldn’t be so fast, like so many Democrats, to junk the Senate’s filibuster rule (which is not found in the Constitution). Yet time is not America’s friend when it comes to regaining lost ground in a fast-moving industry like semiconductors, and if Washington continues its business-as-usual approach on this issue, history will likely conclude that the American political system failed a big test.

Full disclosure:  I own a not-trivial number of shares of TSMC common stock.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Is More Immigration Really the Key to America’s Tech Future?

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Cato Institute, China, education, entrepreneurs, Germany, H-1B visa, immigrants, Immigration, India, innovation, Israel, Japan, skills, South Korea, start-ups, Taiwan, technology, Washington Post, Worldometers.info, {What's Left of) Our Economy

One of the most compelling – and most often made – arguments in favor of higher U.S. legal immigration levels has to do with innovation. Supposedly, without encouraging ever more foreign workers to move to America, the nation will never be able to maintain its global technology leadership, and ultimately an acceptable, much less improved, degree of prosperity. (See, e.g., here and here.)

Part of the rationale for a welcoming posture, as indicated above, has to do with policies toward highly skilled and educated immigrants in particular (like those admitted under the H-1B program), and the special visa quotas allotted to them. But as the Washington Post editorial board recently made clear, there’s a more general view that immigration is especially good at providing America with “a steady supply of working-age strivers” and that “This nation’s prosperity, pluck, ambition and effervescent character are the products of more than 100 million immigrants who have sought better lives in the United States since its founding.” In other words, immigrants are far more likely than the native-born population to possess the risk-taking and general entrepreneurial traits that lead to so much technological progress.

I’ve already debunked one aspect of these claims here, but because they keep popping up, I keep thinking more about them, and have come across more data that not only casts further doubt on the technology-related need for more immigrants, but that indicate that the immigration cheerleaders are putting the cart before the horse.

For instance, it’s widely agreed that the U.S. tech sector is considerably healthier than Germany’s. In this vein, a widely followed global innovation index issued each year by a United Nations agency ranks the former third in the world and the latter ninth. Ninth isn’t so bad, but it’s at the least curious in this regard that for decades at least, Germany has admitted many more immigrants as a share of total population than has the United States.

Indeed, in 1990 (a good starting point, since current Germany came into being with the reunification that year of the former Federal Republic that comprised the nation’s western part and the former Communist run east), Germany’s immigrant inflow of 1.256 million represented 1.59 percent of the new country’s 79.054 million inhabitants. The 1.536 million green cards awarded by the United States that year accounted for only 0.60 percent of its 252.120 million people. (My official sources for German and U.S. annual immigration totals are here and here, respectively. For population, I used the reliable Worldometers.info website.)

But maybe Germany has made up some ground on the United States during this nearly three-decade period? Not according to this study last year from the Cato Institute – one of America’s foremost supporters of much more lenient U.S. immigration policies. If you look at Figure 2, you see that in 2018, Germany was lagging the United States just about as badly in the number of patents it received in the United States (still the world’s most important market for technology) as it was in 1990.

There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that its relatively large immigration inflows have given Germany much of an edge in entrepreneurship, either. As of 2019, according to this source, Germany’s business start-up rate was less than half that of the United States.

This chart, moreover, makes clear that it’s not just the U.S.-Germany comparison that mucks up the ostensible relationship between tech prowess and entrepreneurship on the one hand, and immigration levels on the other. After all, in 2019, India’s start-up rate was also much higher than Germany’s – even though India is much better known for sending folks abroad than for attracting them. Foreigners aren’t exactly flocking to live in China, either, yet its start-up rate matches Germany’s.

That Cato Institute study provides more complicating international comparisons. That Figure 2 shows that as of 2018, Israel has forged into the lead as the country receiving the largest number of U.S. patents. And its performance started taking off in the mid-1990s. Yet in 1995, when Germany and Israel were roughly on a par in their ability to receive American patents, the 76,361 immigrants Israel admitted in 1995 equalled 1.36 percent of its population of 5.619 million – not far from relatively un-innovative Germany’s figures. By the time it became the international leader, Israel’s immigration rate had fallen to 0.32 percent of its 8.972 million population – much lower than that of Germany, which had become a clear als-ran on the U.S. patent scene – and roughly the same as the recent U.S. rate which has been decried as so woefully inadequate.

And look at the other top performers in Figure 2 other than the United States and Israel. Taiwan hasn’t been anything close to an immigration magnet, either, and ditto for South Korea. As for Japan, it’s long been known as one of the most xenophobic countries in the world (as noted in that Washington Post editorial).

What do the non-U.S. “patent tigers” identified by Cato have in common? As author Jonathan M. Barnett puts it:

“Short on consumers, resources, and labor (and saddled with geographic separation from key consumer markets), the patent tigers (especially Israel and Taiwan) were compelled to specialize in innovation-intensive segments of the global supply chain in which ingenuity, rather than labor or natural resources, conferred a competitive advantage.”

As a result, as widely agreed, they’ve worked hard to create top-notch educational systems for their own populations. German education is highly regarded, too, but it’s often observed that its history and culture in particular have discouraged self-starters.

The lessons for the United States seem pretty clear here.  On the one hand, it’s got lots of the overall population, raw materials and domestic markets that the patent tigers lack.  On the other, unlike Germany, it still enjoys an entrepreneur- and innovation-friendly culture.  If Americans did a much better job of educating their own people, especially in the math, science, and technology fields, they should be able to keep its global technology edge even while controlling immigration more tightly. 

If, however, the nation continues to coddle underperforming school systems, especially at the primary and secondary levels, the argument for relying on immigration to fill the tech gap will look all the stronger.  And in a supreme irony, the ready availability of highly skilled and educated immigrants will keep reducing national incentives to get the national education act together.      

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Are Businesses Closet Techno-Nationalists?

Tags

CCP Virus, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, decoupling, General Electric, globalization, innovation, nationalism, tech, technology, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Even if these poll findings are as off as many of the surveys of the 2020 election vote were, they’d still be pretty astounding. After years of multinational companies all over the world (including and perhaps especially in the United States), proclaiming that promoting innovation requires ever greater cooperation with partners across borders, General Electric’s (GE) latest annual survey of business views on the subject turned up strong support for what it calls a protectionist perspective.

It’s definitely something to keep in mind the next time you hear the China-coddling corporate Offshoring Lobby insist that a major U.S. economic decoupling from the People’s Republic would cut America off from an increasingly important source of technological progress, or the Open Borders-friendly Cheap Labor Lobby claim that restricting the inflow of foreign technology workers would deny them and the national economy as a whole access to many of the world’s best talent.

GE has been conducting these studies since 2011, and this year has looked at the subject twice – in January and September. In toto, the views of corporate innovation executives from 22 countries ranging from Kenya to the United States were sampled. (The January poll reported results from 22 countries and the September follow up from ten.)

Among the most startling results:

>This past January, fully 66 percent of the U.S. executives who responded considered that the country is “self-sufficient, and does not need to rely on other countries to innovate.” By September, this figure had climbed to 78 percent.

>In China, the comparable figures were 56 percent and 52 percent, respectively – meaning that, at least according to this GE study, China’s confidence in its technological autonomy has declined.

>Going global, in September, 69 percent of respondents reporting that their national governments had become more techno-protectionist in the last six months said that these policies had “a positive impact on innovation.” Viewed from the opposite end of the policy spectrum, only 41 percent of respondents reporting that their national governments had become less protectionist during this period considered this shift to have benefited innovation.

>In September, nearly all (94 percent) of the respondents from that month’s smaller sample agreed that “a protectionist stance is important to help address the major economic problems in this country created by the pandemic” and an equal percentage believed that such policies are “important to help the domestic economy recover.”

One reason for this support of techno-protectionism might be the widespread belief that it’s increasingly become the way of the world. Fully half of the September respondents told GE that “their government has taken a more protectionist stance during the COVID-19 pandemic” with only 13 percent reporting movement in the opposite direction and 34 percent perceiving no change.

At the same time, the GE poll revealed a deep ambivalence in business ranks about the virtues of tech self-sufficiency. Notably, 86 percent of the September respondents agreed that “More partnerships across countries will help drive progress on innovation.” And half worried that “Restrictions on movement of people/goods/services” were “a major cause for concern regarding innovation progress.”

One possible reason for the continued belief in the value of international collaboration: seemingly strong confidence that techno-nationalism (at least in their home market) will be a flash in the pan. Only 22 percent believed that such protectionism would last more than three years.

These results hardly exhaust the list of unexpected findings from the GE report. In fact, you’ll be seeing some more of them on RealityChek this week. But the discrepancy between them and the almost unamimous endorsement for the free movement of technological knowledge across borders from the corporate community deserves much more attention, and represents evidence that many of the globalist public positions taken by these executives’ companies and businesses stem from concern not for for the national interest, but for their own already healthy bottom lines.

Making News: New Article Spotlights America’s Second-Rate Semiconductor Manufacturing

Tags

Asia-Pacific, China, globalism, innovation, Intel, Making News, manufacturing, offshoring, semiconductors, Taiwan, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, technology, The National Interest

I’m pleased to report that a new article of mine has just been published in the November-December, 2020 issue of The National Interest. The focus: America’s loss of its longtime global lead in manufacturing semiconductors. Given the central role played by microchips to the constantly acclerating information technology revolution, this setback threatens both the nation’s prosperity and its security — especially since the world’s most advanced semiconductors are now produced a grand total of 100 miles from China.

Click here to read.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Making News: Podcast On-Line of National Radio Interview on U.S.-China Relations & the Biden Manufacturing Plan

Tags

Biden, China, election 2020, Europe, European Union, innovation, Joe Biden, Making News, manufacturing, Market Wrap with Moe Ansari, offshoring, technology, Trade, trade war, Trump

I’m pleased to announce that a podcast is now on-line of an interview I did yesterday on Moe Ansari’s nationally syndicated radio show.  Click here and then scroll down a bit to the segment with my name on it to listen to a timely, informative session on the CCP Virus’ impact on U.S.-based manufacturing; on U.S.-China relations and President Trump’s trade war (which could include Europe), and on presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden’s plan for reviving American industry. The segment comes on at about the 23:50 mark.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The AP’s Manufactured Nonsense About Manufacturing

Tags

AP, Associated Press, Calvin Woodward, fake news, innovation, Jobs, manufacturing, productivity, research and development, technology, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The Associated Press (AP) is a ginormous global news organization, and its reach is especially widespread here in the United States (although I couldn’t find figures breaking out its American clientele specifically). So it’s a big deal when one of its highest profile writers spreads the kind of utter claptrap about domestic U.S. manufacturing that Calvin Woodward just peddled in his new piece on President Trump’s views on the economy.

In an article posted today, Woodward portrayed Mr. Trump’s emphasis on industry (and other elements of his worldview) as nothing more than a pathetic and downright dangerous exercise in nostalgia for the “grunt work of old” that ignores how “Industry, technology and much of the culture are finding new ways of doing and living” and how “U.S. prosperity has been driven for decades by services, technology and new things….”

Some confidence in Woodward’s conclusions might be justified if he relied on manufacturing specialists or even economists to support them. But the authorities he cites are a “professor of communications” and a psychologist who “studies nostalgia from Britain’s University of Southampton.”

Not that economists have been killing it in recent decades in properly evaluating the importance of manufacturing. But if Woodward had bothered to consult one,  the odds would have been higher that he’d have encountered the idea that industry is kind of important for any country seeking to build or maintain a world-class military. Or” that it’s historically been the U.S. economy’s leader in productivity growth (although as RealityChek regulars know, it’s recently been losing its mojo on that score). Or that it boasts one of the nation’s biggest employment multipliers – meaning that the creation of each American manufacturing job generates an outsized number of jobs elsewhere in the economy compared with employment increases in most other sectors. Or that manufacturing accounts for the lion’s share of American business research and development spending. 

That last fact is especially important for Woodward and others of his ilk to know. For it makes clear that if the United States is to keep generating the “technology and new things” that of course are central to its hopes for continued (much less greater) prosperity, it has better keep its manufacturing base world class.

I’ll leave it to you to judge whether Woodward’s article qualifies as Fake News.  But there can’t be any legitimate doubt that it’s manufactured nonsense.   

Those Stubborn Facts: Innovation Machine?

Tags

Bell Labs, IBM, innovation, National Affairs, Oren Cass, Silicon Valley, tech, Those Stubborn Facts

Number of Nobel prizes won by researchers at Bell Labs: 8

Number of Nobel prizes won by researchers at IBM: 5

Number of Nobel prizes won by researchers funded by a Silicon          Valley firm: 0

 

(Source: “Putting Dynamism in Its Place,” by Oren Cass, National Affairs, No. 39, Spring, 2019, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/putting-dynamism-in-its-place)

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Big Messages Being Sent by a Jetsons-Like Invention

Tags

Aeolus Robotics, automation, capital spending, Consumer Electronics Show, Democrats, domestic workers, economics, Fight for 15, Immigration, innovation, Jobs, minimum wage, offshoring, Open Borders, robots, Roomba, Rosey, technology, The Jetsons, Trade, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Along with the rest of the world, I just got another reminder that the future is arriving a lot faster than most of us expect. And that’s got especially big implications for related points I’ve long been making about U.S. immigration policy and efforts to boost the country’s minimum wage.

For many years, when I’ve spoken about immigration policy, I’ve used the following argument to explain the relationship between the mass immigration America has fostered for so long (including winking at illegal immigration) and the productivity gains and technological progress needed to ensure that living standards can improve in a sustainable (not bubbly) way:

“Does anyone remember Rosey, the robot maid on the 1960s TV cartoon show, ‘The Jetsons’? Did you ever wonder why, decades later, there’s still no Rosey – or anything better than a Roomba? A major reason has to be that, with so many legally and illegally present housekeepers and housekeeper candidates available, and willing to work so cheaply, there’s been little incentive to automate domestic work.”

It was my way of using pop culture to illustrate why a big spur to technological progress (and the higher productivity it tends to bring) for the United States in particular has been the scarce labor situation that’s existed for most of American history. With workers in chronically short supply, and therefore increasingly expensive to hire, U.S. businesses were constantly looking for labor saving devices that could cut their costs. And American inventors were terrific at seizing the opportunity and providing them.

In other words, the U.S. economy was behaving exactly the way the textbooks said it should. When labor became too costly, business stepped up its search for ways to substitute capital (which often meant) technology, for those overly dear workers. More recently, as labor has become more abundant (and therefore, all else equal, cheaper), this dynamic has often shifted into reverse.

Incidentally, mass immigration policies aren’t solely to blame. Offshoring-friendly international trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and similar trade policies (like coddling China’s trade predation) have also greatly expanded the amount of workers realistically available to American employers, especially in sectors like manufacturing. And it’s surely no coincidence that business spending on equipment and machines and the like (called capital spending) has been a notable weakness lately in the U.S. economy. (In fact, although many factories in China are automating rapidly – because of wage increases – this report makes clear that labor surpluses are still slowing its pace in some important Chinese manufacturing industries.)

What has this to do with Rosey? Simple. As this Washington Post piece from last week shows, she’s here – or just about here. For at the latest annual Consumer Electronics Show (one of the tech industry’s major events), a company called Aeolus Robotics unveiled a device that looks awfully similar. According to the Post reporter, this “child-sized” machine

“performed domestic duties such as mopping, picking up stuffed animals off the floor and moving furniture, and, perhaps most impressively, retrieving drinks from the fridge using an intricate-looking grabbing arm — all without human assistance.”

The robot – billed as “the first multi-functional robot that can act like a human being” – still doesn’t crack wise in a New York accent, like the cartoon Rosey. But how far off can that be?

Technology and labor costs hardly move in lockstep, and of course innovation results from many causes. But economic theory, anyway, is saying that my view on the cost and supply of domestic workers is becoming outdated. Common sense also suggests that if something like Rosey is just about here, then domestic workers aren’t as cheap and/or as abundant as I believed. So their wages may well have been rising strongly enough lately to create demand for an automated counterpart.

At the same time, the advent of “Rosey” (and how many other devices like “her” just over the horizon?) amounts to a frantically waving red flag about the wisdom of any immigration policy moves likely to increase the supply of poorly-skilled workers in the American economy – which is to say, any proposals supported by the national Democratic Party and the rest of the country’s Open Borders enthusiasts. Just what kind of work can they be expected to find? Indeed, the automation progress represented by “Rosey” signals that much of the existing workforce in the nation is going to be increasingly hard-pressed to secure or hang onto decent-paying jobs.

Similarly, although I believe there’s still a strong economic (and moral) case for a national minimum wage that tracks inflation, the seemingly impending dawn of the Age of Rosey raises big questions about the wisdom of the kinds of minimum wage jumps sought by the “Fight for 15” campaign and other activists.

“Rosey’s” appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show doesn’t mean that I’ve come down one way or the other in the vital debate taking place today over whether all this recent technological progress ultimately will be a net job killer or creator. But it seems clear as a bell that this tech wave is being completely ignored by the Open Borders and the Fight for 15 backers, and that Americans closest to the low end of the wage and income scale are likely to be among the biggest victims.