Want to Win the Robotics Race? Then the US Needs a National Robotics Industries Act

If we don’t build the robotics future here, we’ll be forced to import it from abroad.

The a16z essay, “America Cannot Lose the Robotics Race,” makes a strong case that the US is woefully behind in the race for global robotics supremacy. Anne Neuberger and Martin Casado lay at least some of this blame on the West’s inability to “thoughtfully modernize regulations”:

[T]he transformations that the [I]nternet facilitated took place in a setting where governments recognized the benefits of innovation and encouraged a light-touch regulatory regime. Now they’ll be playing out in the regulation-heavy workplaces and factory floors of the United States. Our “permission-first” regulatory regime in everything from drones to sidewalk delivery robots means that any company interested in robotics will have to spend time and money dealing with lawyers, permits, and endless regulatory approvals. For more established players, agreements with labor unions make automation maximally difficult: dockworkers unions have been fighting against automation for years, helping ensure that American ports are some of the slowest and least efficient in the world. Simply put, we are not set up to win.

In short, Neuberger and Casado argue that if the US fails to lead in robotics, every downstream pillar of our national competitiveness – from scientific progress to industrial output – will weaken. Long-term American prosperity is dependent on embodied AI being deployed in the real world. And soon, because the hour is late, and the US needs to act much more boldly if we are to seize this pivotal moment.

Towards a National Robotics Industries Act

In previous posts, I noted the value of the US taking the lead in developing a national robotics strategy, as well as the policy pieces that should compose such a strategy. But a high-level policy wish list, while a necessary precondition for safeguarding US geopolitical interests in this technology, won’t be enough to secure US leadership in robotics.

What the US needs to move from permissioned to permissionless is, ironically enough, legislation that tackles all the robotics policy imperatives in one fell swoop: A National Robotics Industries Act (NRIA).

Corridors of Ambiguity vs Regulatory Umbrellas

Why do we need the NRIA?

Well, just as the permissionless nature of the Internet fueled the growth of US primacy in the digital economy, the permissioned nature of the “world of atoms” (h/t Peter Thiel) will increasingly be the barrier to the US leading in the next wave of general-purpose robotics technology. That’s important because robotics, like AI, isn’t just a sector of the economy – it’s the operating system for the next generation of economic development.

In the digital realm, software development and deployment have largely benefited from “corridors of ambiguity” — those areas of the market that have been left relatively unregulated by sector-specific regulations. This uncertainty allowed new markets in unanticipated products and services to emerge without the regulatory frictions that burden more traditionally regulated industries. This approach has allowed the US to become the world’s engine of digital innovation over the past quarter century, in contrast to policy approaches that prioritize “regulatory umbrellas,” like in the EU, which foreclose the emergence of unforeseen possibilities from these corridors of ambiguity.

This longstanding corridors of ambiguity in digital services has directly contributed to the AI boom in the US. As we move towards a world where real-world applications of this technology become necessary to justify future valuations and market returns, however, that ambiguity will increasingly give way to the existing regulatory umbrella in the US. It’s one thing to develop an AI brain within the corridors of ambiguity; it’s another thing to incorporate that brain into a body that operates beneath the regulatory umbrella.

As a result, we need to take on the arduous task of marginal deregulation across some of the most cost-disease-ridden sectors of the economy — those realms that, incidentally, also happen to bear some of the highest regulatory obligations, which in turn create high barriers to technological disruption and market entry.

So where Neuberger and Casado leave off, policy particulars need to pick up — by creating the conditions where robotics companies can deploy faster, scale quicker, and integrate into those cost-disease centers of the broader economy with minimal friction. What follows are some concrete suggestions for what could be included in the NRIA to help expedite our journey to America’s global dominance of the robotics industry.

A National Robotics Industries Act

The NRIA would do for robotics deployment what the Interstate Highway System did for mobility, and what the CHIPS Act is doing for semiconductors — treat automation as critical national infrastructure. What follows are four general provisions that such legislation should consider — each addressing a vital piece of the broader robotics ecosystem where the US currently lags.

1. Incentivizing American Adoption of Robotics

There are many barriers to robotics adoption in the US. Certainly the regulatory angle is present across economic sectors where cost-disease is rampant, but there are also frictions that emanate from both the cultural zeitgeist and high upfront costs of adoption. One way to address the former is to create an environment where firms — especially small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) — are incented towards more widescale adoption and integration. As technologies proliferate and are more ever-present in day-to-day life, people become more comfortable with their presence. More people experiencing a technology’s benefits firsthand is the surest way to build trust and confidence in the technology.

The CHIPS Act proved the US can mobilize industrial policy around strategic technology. Robotics deserves a similar framework, though focused less on direct government grants for research and more on deployment incentives. Small and medium-sized enterprises in particular are at a striking disadvantage when it comes to absorbing the upfront capital costs necessary for adopting both traditional industrial robotics and their newly-emergent advanced variants. They could potentially benefit from tax credits and rebates, though if such a program were to be proposed, it ought to require a post-hoc programmatic analysis to assess whether its usage materially impacted adoption of the technology among SMEs.

Expanding capex support — whether through grants and cost-sharing programs, tax and investment credits, or other mechanisms — that targets individual components of the broader supply chain (i.e., sensors, actuators, harmonic drives, gyroscopes, etc.) is one targeted support vehicle to help incentivize adoption. The DOD Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) model is instructive here. The NRIA could copy the OSC structure and house its variant in a relevant agency like, e.g., the Small Business Administration or Department of Commerce while expanding the program’s definition of “critical technologies” to cover a broader subset of the robotics components.

The NRIA might also include an accelerated depreciation timetable for robotics hardware, with higher immediate cost deductions and phase-outs. The US tax code provides for general tax benefits under its Section 179 provision governing depreciation, but no robotics- or automation-specific depreciation benefits. Such an incentive, paired with targeted grants, could help spur wider-scale adoption of newer robotics systems among smaller firms.

2. Rightsizing Regulations in the “World of Atoms”

When it comes to more advanced humanoid robots, a big barrier to broader adoption is a lack of clear safety standards that creates the market certainty necessary for both investment and deployment. To address this concern, the US should create tiered safety certification regimes that acknowledge the difference between, e.g., a collaborative robot arm, a surgical assistant, and an autonomous quadruped in a warehouse. In other words, standards should reflect real-world use-cases based on the risk a multipedal robotic system poses in a given environment. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is the obvious candidate for housing such an effort, but we can go further. The US should establish a National Robotics Authority housed within NIST (NIST-NRA), tasked with four primary purposes:

• Mapping Sector-Specific Regulatory Barriers to Robotics Adoption. In concert with the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and sector-specific regulators, NIST-NRA should coordinate on producing an annual review of existing regulatory obligations that pose direct barriers to wider adoption of advanced robotics systems throughout the economy. Such a report, informed by consultations with industry and outside stakeholders, would serve as an invaluable guidepost for how Congress and the Administration can identify, and address, existing bottlenecks holding back US leadership in robotics development and adoption.

• Developing Technical Standards and Guidance. NIST is internationally renowned for its commitment to rigorous technical analysis, and serves as an ideal home for developing best practices and guidance for advanced robotics systems. Those best practices can then serve as the bedrock for wider market, and government, adoption of new robotics systems.

• Engaging in International Advocacy. NIST-NRA can serve an important purpose as the defacto federal agency for industry engagement on robotics issues. It can also serve a central coordination function with other US agencies — and foreign counterparts who share an innovation-friendly approach to governance (i.e., Singapore, Japan) — to push for US-led standards in international standards organizations (i.e., IEEE, ISO).

• Building “Grand Challenges” Roadmaps. Export the “grand challenge” model popularized by DARPA (for autonomous vehicles) and other agencies to robotics. The NIST-NRA can develop proposals for technical milestones and, in conjunction with purchase guarantees from other agencies, can help to both de-risk early deployments and pull emerging tech into national missions.

The NIST-NRA can help to plug many different gaps in the existing federal robotics policy landscape, but its most important function would be to serve as the recognized central coordinating function for federal robotics policy. Importantly, housing this function at NIST, which has no formal regulatory enforcement authority, sends a clear message to ecosystem stakeholders that the new agency’s mission is not to regulate robotics, but to “clear the runway and help achieve escape velocity.”

3. Expanding the Robotics Workforce

As discussed in my last post, robotics shouldn’t be viewed as a job killer, but rather the next stage in the ongoing process of economic automation that began back in the late 18th century. Robotics, much like AI, will augment and redeploy human capital, not destroy it. Nevertheless, policy needs to accommodate the negative impacts of displacement effects on the workforce. Restructuring the social safety net is a big topic, however, and likely beyond the purview of the proposed NRIA.

That said, the workforce issue that does need to be addressed in the NRIA is less about retraining programs (the US has many such programs, such as TAA) and more about the need for talent pipeline creation in advance of wider-spread robotics deployment. A lot more robots means a lot more jobs building, maintaining, and repairing those systems — jobs that require technical education and credentialing for which the US is not currently adequately prepared to fill.

To address this gap, the NRIA should include a provision that establishes a nationally recognized robotics credentialing program, likely housed at the Department of Labor. Such a program needs to be broadly accessible and involve prioritizing partnerships with community colleges and apprenticeship programs, not traditional four-year colleges. Such a credentialing program and associated partnerships should be open to funding from existing educational grant streams. The government can enhance this ecosystem by also making GI Bill funding available for such certification programs.

The next generation robotics economy will ultimately be built by blue-collar technologists. The NRIA should help pave the path for them to lead the world in that endeavour.

4. Securing the US Robotics Stack

AI chips dominate attention, but the robotics stack depends on dozens of upstream chokepoints — harmonic drives, MEMS gyroscopes, compact gearboxes, lidar units, edge controllers, and industrial batteries. China is increasingly in control of much of that stack.

To counter this, the US needs to secure its own robotics stack. In addition to its other purposes, the NIST-NRA should be tasked with working to coordinate a whole-of-government strategic response to securing these vital inputs to the robotics market, including by mapping critical components and identify single-point foreign dependencies and coordinating a more formal Actuator & Sensor Industrialization Program through the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Commerce. The government should also consider how it can potentially leverage reshoring credits or purchase guarantees to suppliers that opt to manufacture critical components here in the US.

Equally important to the supply chain, as Neuberger and Casado note in the a16z article, is access to real-world training data:

As with LLMs, training advanced robotics systems requires pretraining data on the scale of the internet, along with reinforcement learning to train generalist policies that can reason across a wide range of distortions in environment, perception, and task. As data from real-world deployment comes online, the country with more robots gains flywheel momentum; more deployment means more high-quality data which underwrites further deployment.

In a previous post, I argued that one mechanism for addressing the growing gap between Chinese and American firms’ access to this key robotics input, is the development of a National Data Escrow Corporation. Such a construct could, if properly structured, incentivize firms to pool their collective proprietary training data resources, creating a strategic US resource that can be leveraged to help close the gap between the Chinese and the US.

Conclusion

Where AI has seen an explosion in investment, robotics still faces the drag of deployment friction: liability law, procurement lags, safety ambiguity, and fragmented supply chains. The NRIA can help turn corridors of ambiguity into deployment corridors, leveraging everything from US standards development leadership and the depth of our capital markets to ensure America dominates the “world of atoms” in the coming decades much as we have dominated the “world of bits” over the last quarter century.

The robotics race will only be won through a deliberately architected strategy that, above all, prioritizes domestic deployment of new, advanced robotics systems. The US has the capital, the innovators, and the national imperative. What it needs now is coordination, cultural inclination, and focus.

If America treats robotics the way it once treated aviation, space, and semiconductors, leadership is fully within reach.

If not, we’ll end up inheriting the future that others build for us.