The US Used to Demand the Best Tech. Now We Ban It

I've been thinking for a while that some part of the ebullience towards AI among the American decision-maker class is that it is a good way to stick our heads in the sand and pretend like super-intelligent AI will make up for not being able to build competitive cars and drones. It has the feeling of an easy-to-digest explanation but I'm worried that it's probably wrong.

>Americans watch the rest of the world getting better, cheaper, ...

If we wanted cheap cars, there needs to be demand to justify building giga factories of EVs.

There just wasnt sufficient consumer demand to justify the giga factory investments

China CAN generate demand for EVs because they have the political ability to

1) force gas restricted cars to only drive on certain days of the week

2) create a brutal lottery to get a license plate to legally drive a gas car

3) provide a bunch of subsidies

The US has only done option 3.

Out govt system literally doesnt have the political will to do these brutal but effective policy changes

The WTO was a mistake. We should return to a GATT style trade policy where free trade is allowed (mostly) between open democratic nations with aligned security interests and goals.

Opening the way for foreign competition.

Umm not when the adversary is using heavy government subsidies to undercut prices and essentially take over the industry. Look at what’s happening to the European car industry, with more job losses planned by VW just this week

To play devil's advocate, there is some logic to banning Chinese cars, which is that their firmware risks sending telemetry to China, also disabling/malfunctioning the car if China were to have a military engagement with the US. I suggest a middle road which is that the entire telemetry surface and firmware updates must be domestically managed, with no room for a closed-source foreign entity to manipulate it.

An EV really shouldn't be needing to send telemetry at all. It's not a self-driving car. It would be better if the user could reliably and permanently disable it even when one's phone is connected.

The vehicle would also have to be tested to ensure that no covert or p2p radio signals can be sent to it that can signal it to shutdown or malfunction. This is very difficult to assert. There would have to exist domestic personnel who take responsibility for it.

Frankly though, Israel scares me more than China, as Israel is known to actually add remotely detonated explosives to exported consumer products.

It’s been like this for a while. Take a technology, call it a weapon and control it. Same playbook.