Roomba: Hitting the Wall | The New Space Race | 3

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0:16David Brown:From Audible Originals, I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars.

0:39David Brown:In the early 2000s, Roombas began whirring around millions of U.S. homes, sucking up pet hair and Cheerios, among other things. The circular vacuums were a success story for their American inventors, bringing us one step closer to this scene on the Jetsons where robots do the work while we play. But the good times didn't last forever. iRobot, Roomba's parent company, declared bankruptcy in December of 2025, and Picea Robotics, its Chinese supplier, acquired iRobot. To some, that bankruptcy feels like more than just a business loss. It seems like yet another win for Chinese tech. In recent years, visitors to China have come back to the U.S.

1:20David Brown:shaking their heads, saying we've been out-manufactured, out-smarted, just plain outdone by the Chinese. Here to talk about all of this and a whole lot more, Christopher Mims, a tech reporter at the Wall Street Journal. He's the author of How to AI, Cut Through the Hype, Master the Basics, Transform Your Work, as well as another book, Arriving Today, From Factory to Front Door, Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy. We're going to talk about innovation, AI, and robots. Lots of robots. All that is coming up.

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2:47David Brown:Joining us today, Christopher Mims, tech reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Christopher. So glad you could join us on Business Wars. It's a pleasure to be here. Long time listener. Well, thank you so much. And obviously, long time reader here. So what was your reaction to the news back in December that iRobot had declared bankruptcy? Was that sort of the end of an era for for you as you saw it or what? Yeah, it was a bummer. I mean, it was a iconic American company that had been in decline for a long time. It had seen layoffs and it ultimately felt like a classic tale of China kind of consuming an American company by copying what it did best and out competing it.

3:32But iRobot is not a failure because it made this completely genre-defining product, the Roomba. This was the first and really still for most people, the only successful mass market robot in history, right? Do you have any other robots in your house? I mean, does the dishwasher count? This really was singular and it felt like a little piece of the future was peeking into the present. You know, I've spent time with Colin Angle, you know, the founder of iRobot since then. And his next act, which he has told me was what he wanted to do all along, is a form of emotionally intelligent robot. So it's like a companion.

4:13It's funny that, you know, the guy who gave us the Roomba really always wanted to make a pet that would comfort us and keep us from feeling too lonely. What does it look like? It looks like a cross between a teddy bear and a dog. And this is just the first of many, they say.

4:30David Brown:Do you believe there are legitimate security concerns about the acquisition of iRobot by Picea Robotics? Is there anything that we need to be concerned about there? I do think that if you're going to have an internet connected device in your home that has some kind of camera on it, you might want to think twice about where it's sending that data. The bottom line is that if the Chinese government wants to requisition data from a company, It absolutely can. So that is always the concern with anything that is made in China and that connects to servers in China. The defense apparatus in the UK was recently embarrassed.

5:08They were building autonomous sea drones there and they found out that one component, just one component was sending data back to China. Now, it's unclear if that was just a cheap component that, you know, needed a little connectivity. So it was connecting to a server there to do some basic function. But, you know, are you sure that the cheap iRobot Roomba clone that you bought isn't doing the same thing?

5:28David Brown:So I guess I wonder what this means when we talk about like the U.S. losing its competitive advantage with, say, the Roomba. I mean, we have devices that have been designed in the U.S. You know, if you look on the back of an old iPod, you'll see designed in California. Right. And yet we all know that this wasn't made in California. It was made in China. And so what are we losing in effect when a company like iRobot disappears? One thing that we lose is a very particular kind of institutional knowledge, which only occurs when the designers and the engineers who are thinking up a device have direct access to the people manufacturing it.

6:12And there's a feedback loop between the people on the factory floor and the people who are designing that object. And if you want to see a positive example, you look at a company like General Motors. As they have moved into electric vehicles, obviously they're still doing their manufacturing domestically. They have their own battery lab. They keep coming up with new chemistries and kinds of batteries. There's a very tight loop between engineers and designers all the way down to the people manufacturing it, you know, with their hands, with the robots that do the manufacturing. And when you break that loop, when you outsource the manufacturing to China or elsewhere, and then a second thing happens, which is just as bad, which is that now the folks who are actually doing the hard work of manufacturing that object for you, they have direct access to all of your intellectual property.

7:05So they can just copy what you did and make a cheaper version of it.

7:09David Brown:I'm wondering, though, about whether or not we lost that intellectual property advantage a long time ago. I don't mean to go down too much of a rabbit hole with the iPhone, but it's such an iconic thing. But if you go to a place like Iran or Vietnam or someplace like that, you could buy a phone that for all intents and purposes looked every bit like a genuine iPhone and seemed to work the same way as well. I mean, how long has this been going on? Well, I think it's been going on since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. I mean, it's easy to forget that the Industrial Revolution began in England and Americans were avid copiers of key early technology like automated looms.

7:54There's a real story about an American. Well, he became an American. He memorized the layout and the functioning of all the machines in an English mill. And in New England, he set up an identical copy of the mill. So people have been doing this to each other for centuries. And what's happened with China is that by outsourcing their manufacturing, every time an American or a non-Chinese company has a new product that people want to buy and they choose to manufacture it in China, they're also choosing to give up that intellectual property forever. and it doesn't matter whether their patent laws at play or not.

8:33I mean, a lot of times they're just not relevant because the laws are different in China and the government obviously has a different set of interests. So the game now is, as new things are invented, can they be manufactured domestically?

8:44David Brown:Well, let me put that question to you. Can they? I mean, do we have what it takes to build the next generation of whatever that next great thing is here in the United States, whether we're talking about a Roomba or we're talking about something that perhaps we haven't quite imagined just yet? That's unclear, but let me give you a slightly different answer. So you could manufacture critical components in countries that respect your intellectual property laws. America has fantastic relationships with countries like South Korea, where manufacturing can occur and you're not necessarily going to lose all of your intellectual property.

9:21And that can happen elsewhere. As for domestic manufacturing, we still have a viable automobile industry in the U.S. It is pivoting toward the future. I know people like to say, well, we're behind and it's hopeless, but trust me, Ford, General Motors, the auto manufacturers that count, Tesla still, Rivian, Slate, they are doing domestic manufacturing. And so if they can do that and we can continue to set up, you know, new plants to manufacture chips, which we're doing in the U.S. I mean, Micron is setting up in Syracuse a giant memory chip manufacturing plant. It can happen in the U.S. We do have the natural resources.

9:59We do have the human capital for now. It's a question of whether we are willing to, frankly, pay a little bit more for things that are manufactured domestically. I mean, you can also just create laws which force companies and force the federal government, for example, when they're doing defense procurement to only buy things that are manufactured in America. But at the end of the day, America cannot do it alone, right? So it will take an alliance of many countries that are harmonizing their laws in order to compete with China. China is just that big.

10:35David Brown:You know, I'm struck by what you were saying earlier about how this has been going on since really the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. And that's a really interesting point. But it reminds me that, you know, once upon a time in the not so distant past, it wasn't China that was eating our lunch. It was Japan that was eating our lunch. Remember? Remember, I'm wondering, though, with Japan losing its dominance in tech manufacturing to China, if there was a lesson we could have should have learned back then that we were unwilling to learn or maybe we we continue to overlook in all of these transitions, you know, in technology.

11:11I think one lesson that's important to learn is that diffusion of technology is inevitable and is desirable. The question is the rate of diffusion and what that does to your country's competitiveness. And so maybe one lesson I think we could have learned from what happened in Japan is how in a world where technology diffusion is happening, do you stay ahead? And the U.S. has always been really good at supporting fundamental research that leads to new breakthroughs. And we probably could do a much better job of creating a pipeline between new innovations and how do we scale that up into a big industry when it takes time for that to occur.

11:57And frankly, we have done it here and there. People forget that Tesla has become the size that it is now because it got huge multi-hundred million dollar loans from the U.S. Department of Energy, which wanted to support the manufacturer domestically of electric vehicles. Tesla would not be here today without that support. That's called industrial policy. China is great at it. Every five years, it says what it does on the tin. It's a five-year plan. And they say, here's what we're going to prioritize. here's what we're going to pour money into. And America and the West has been averse to doing that because we are the land of free enterprise.

12:35We don't want to meddle in markets. We don't want to necessarily pick national heroes. But China has definitively demonstrated that if you don't do that, you will not own the future of these big industries, which require many years of massive investment to get to a scale where you can then dominate the world with them.

12:55David Brown:We're going to talk a little bit more about what the U.S. can and can't do and about some other technologies that are right there on the horizon and what these changes add up to for us and for the rest of the world. We're talking with Wall Street Journal tech journalist Christopher Mims. Stay with us.

13:18Hey, it's Mike Corey, the host of Against the Odds from Audible Originals. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who live to tell the tale. And sometimes, we get to hear from survivors themselves, in their own words. On our next episode, Sujo John will tell his story of September 11, 2001. That day, he clocked into his job at the World Trade Center's North Tower. Sujo's wife, Mary, pregnant with their first child, worked just next door in the South Tower. Suddenly, an explosion rocked the building. collapsing cubicles and walls. But as Sujo and his office mates raced to escape the smoldering building, they heard another massive explosion, and Sujo realized his wife and unborn child were also in grave danger.

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14:18David Brown:In 1969, when police tried to shut down a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, they expected little resistance. Instead, patrons rose up in a series of demonstrations that would ignite a movement. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of the podcast American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times, and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, the police raid on the Stonewall Inn marked a turning point in the fight for LGBTQ rights. But activists had already been hard at work pushing for gay rights for decades, and their battle is still being fought today.

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15:16David Brown:Hey, welcome back to Business Wars. Our guest is Wall Street Journal tech journalist Christopher Mims. I don't know, Chris, you've probably seen that video of an autonomous Chinese robot running a half marathon faster than any human. What is it about the humanoid robot? Why does there seem to be this race to have a humanoid robot as opposed to, you know, something more like a hockey puck that basically gets the job done? Yeah, I mean, the idea here is the world is already made for humans. So if you want to automate what people do in the world that we have now, you need something that is roughly shaped like a human that has the same reach as a human.

15:55I mean, imagine you wanted a robot to take over grilling burgers at a fast food restaurant. Well, you could do it one of two ways. You could make a totally customized robot, just an arm with a flipper. And, you know, maybe it only works with one make and model of grill and it's not that flexible and it's expensive and has to be customized and it's only going to be sold to people who need burger flipping robots. And by the way, those kinds of burger flipping robots do exist and they do work pretty well. Now imagine instead, let's make a humanoid. Let's make it smart enough to adapt to all kinds of new situations.

16:29And so we can sell a hundred times as many of these robots because it can flip burgers hopefully in any restaurant in the world. And also, once it gets smart enough, you can ask it to go into the back and open up the freezer and get more burgers to flip. It has that flexibility, as they say. And that's one of the things that people like best about human workers, right? Imagine you're running like an Amazon warehouse. Part of the day, you're going to have somebody receiving goods in one end of the warehouse and taking them off of pallets and putting them into bins that get ingested into that warehouse.

17:02And then the next part of the day, they're taking things out of those bins and putting them into the boxes that get shipped to our house. That flexibility is really valuable. And that's what people are hoping for with a humanoid robot.

17:14David Brown:Well, maybe you can answer this question for me because I get what you're saying, that more flexibility ultimately means more sales. But it's funny. One of our producers was saying that the gold standard seems to be finding a humanoid robot that can fold laundry. Is there something about the act of folding laundry that's particularly difficult when it comes to humanoid robots? Robots love repetitive tasks. They love rigid surfaces. They love things that are predictable. And the average t-shirt is just this weird wobbly noodle of a thing. You got to think real hard about where to grab it. All this comes naturally to humans.

17:54It's part of our genius, really. And I think an underappreciated part of our genius. And for a robot, it is just the hardest task. You can train a robot how to take things out of a bin and put them into a box and seal that box up and ship it to somebody on an Amazon delivery truck. That's a solved problem at this point for the most part. But getting that same robot to pick up a shirt and fold it in a way that a person finds acceptable or to sort through a bin of laundry, it turns out to just be a really hard problem. Is anyone doing it well? One of the most convincing demonstrations I saw recently wasn't actually a Chinese company.

18:31There is a company based in Austin, Texas called Aptronic, and they have built what they hope will be the universal physical platform. They're trying to build the cheapest, best humanoid robot, but it's totally mindless. And that's what their CEO has told me. You know, we're just trying to make the best robot body we can. We're going to leave the brains to other people. Their partner is Google's DeepMind, which is Google's AI lab. And they have been working really hard on novel kinds of AI to drive robot bodies. And they very recently showed a video of one of Aptronic's humanoid robots picking up laundry, folding it in a naturalistic way.

19:10And this is the key thing. They say that this robot can go into almost any space, any old bin of laundry, and handle all the variability that comes from being in that novel place. that's what laundry folding robots haven't been able to do up to now. You could get a robot to fold laundry, but you'd have to train it really hard in the one environment.

19:30David Brown:So are you saying that the Aptronic robot, from what you can tell, can go beyond folding shirts and doing whatever is required in the laundry biz and do other things, well, let's just cut to the chase, that could put some folks out of work? Potentially. You know, for every breakthrough, we always run up against a new boundary. So maybe they've solved laundry. Does that mean they have solved making a meal? Because that's kind of an order of magnitude more complexity. I mean, I think about how hard it has been for me to train my teenagers to handle all the different tasks. I mean, there's knife skills.

20:09There's knowing exactly how much water to boil. It can take years to learn how to properly handle a fish or a piece of poultry or a mango. Just because this thing can do laundry doesn't mean that it can come along and take anybody else's job. But could it take over some repetitive tasks? And especially in places where there's a lot of repetition, warehouses, factories? Absolutely.

20:32David Brown:Yeah. In fact, I guess what you wouldn't need even to have the lights on and conceivably, right? I mean, you could have dark factories save on energy bills. Yeah, they call that the lights out factory. I mean, we're already pretty close for certain types of factories that do certain types of manufacturing. You say we're already pretty close. How close? Are we talking a couple of years out, maybe, you know, 2028, 2029, 2030? Are we talking about 2035 or beyond? That's a hard question to answer because it really depends on what you're trying to do. Like there are things in our built environment that truly haven't changed much in 50 or 100 years.