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Monday, August 5, 2024

Chinese-made humanoid robots raise alarms in Congress

Advanced Chinese-made robots with eerily lifelike capabilities are poised to enter the global market — and some US lawmakers are already demanding that they be banned in the US, The Post has learned.

While not yet widely publicized, various Chinese companies have begun producing humanoid robots that are capable of carrying boxes, moving at high speeds and even replicating human facial expressions.

One leading Chinese firm, Unitree Robotics, has developed a $90,000 robot capable of running at speeds of up to 11 mph. A cheaper $16,000 version can absorb punches and kicks and twirl a baton. Many other firms have similar products under development.

Jacob Helberg — a member of the influential US-China Economic and Security Review Commission who played a key role convincing Congress to pass a law this spring to force a sale or ban of TikTok — is one of the loudest voices warning Congress that it risks disaster if it allows the sale of robots made by firms beholden to Beijing.

Helberg said advancements in humanoid technology have occurred “mind-bogglingly fast.”

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“I think we’re 12 months away from a ChatGPT moment where the world goes from being asleep to awake on this issue,” he added.

As they become more advanced, the Chinese Communist Party or state-sponsored bad actors could use the robots — currently marketed as harmless home assistance and super-efficient assembly line workers — to wreak havoc by spying, sabotaging critical infrastructure, or in the most nightmarish scenarios, even physically harming Americans, according to Helberg.

“They can strangle someone in their sleep,” Helberg told The Post. “They can punch a data center and inflict physical harm and destruction of property.

“Ultimately, if TikTok was a Chinese spy balloon in your pocket, Chinese drones on US soil are poised to be a Chinese PLA stealth army on our land,” added Helberg. “And we can’t allow that to happen.”

In June, Helberg, a member of the influential US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, appeared at an event alongside House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) — who said the threat posed by Chinese-made humanoid robots entering the US market was “real and very concerning.”

Some experts see the warning as far-fetched or even silly. Paul Rosenzweig, a former Homeland Security deputy assistant secretary, said scary humanoid robots “are a long way away.”

“There are lots of things in China to worry about, like our competition in AI and their access to American tech and data…But this kind of stuff is just a distraction from much more significant problems,” Rosenzweig said.

Helberg and some lawmakers, however, – including Scalise, House Select Committee on China Chairman Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) and Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) – believe the US is already running out of time to tackle the problem.

The Chinese government has called for mass production of humanoid robots by 2025 and world-class performance by 2027, according to a widely circulated document released last fall. They have cast their ambitions as a race against US firms like Boston Dynamics and Elon Musk’s Tesla.

China’s state-run Global Times recently claimed Chinese robotics firms were “fast catching up with global rivals” and noted a recent event in which Tesla’s “Optimus” appeared alongside “a cohort of 18 humanoid robots designed by Chinese manufacturers.”

The risk posed by Chinese-made robots is “not science fiction,” according to Moolenaar.

“In fact, they are part of the same playbook the Chinese government has run time and again: subsidize a strategic industry, flood foreign markets with predatory pricing in order to eliminate the competition, and then leverage this new dominance to advance the interests of the Chinese Communist Party,” Moolenaar said in a statement.

“From heavy manufacturing to the military, advanced robotics will play a critical role in the future of our economy and our national security. We need to act on this problem now before it is too late,” he added.

In the past, concerns that the Chinese Communist Party exploit seemingly innocuous technology for its advantage have led Congress to blacklist Chinese telecom giant Huawei and to pass a bill requiring Beijing-based ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a total ban.

Britt told The Post she is “working on a legislative fix before any nightmare scenario of today becomes reality tomorrow.”

“Given the FBI already opens a new counterintelligence case against China twice a day, that number will certainly increase drastically if the CCP is allowed to send humanoid robots into our nation’s interior,” Britt added.

As The Post has reported, lawmakers worry that China or other foreign actors could exploit weaknesses in internet-connected “smart” devices that are now commonplace in US households.

Drones and other forms of automated warfare are playing larger roles on modern battlefields and have seen extensive use in the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Hamas war.

During his June 25 appearance alongside Helberg at the Reindustrialize Conference in Detroit, Scalise likened security risks posed by Chinese-made robots to those that led Congress to take action against Huawei and TikTok.

“Without policy action from Washington, China is poised to quickly put American competitors out of business and make Americans reliant on CCP-controlled humanoid robots…We’d have to be delusional or suicidal to allow this to happen,” Scalise said.

Elsewhere, humanoids manufactured by Figure, a startup backed by ChatGPT creator OpenAI, have been put to work on automaker BMW’s assembly line.

Musk, who is known for making bold proclamations about his businesses, claimed earlier this year that Optimus could drive Tesla’s market cap to a whopping $25 trillion over time.

Musk also has predicted that there will be eventually be 20 billion humanoid robots – though he warned we “need to be careful that they don’t go all Terminator on us.”

https://nypost.com/2024/08/05/business/chinese-made-humanoid-robots-raise-alarms-in-congress-stealth-army-on-our-land/

Accidental rise of Kamala Harris is a symptom of an unserious age

Help me out here. Kamala Harris is the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate? How on Earth did that happen?

And what about the other guy? You know, the sitting president — Joe Biden? I realize he withdrew from the race in the constitutionally mandated manner, by posting a sullen document on X, the digital platform formerly known as Twitter. That was well done. Biden managed to make Elon Musk happy after all these years.

But why did Joe go? He never said. Actually, he made it clear that he thought his magnificent record in office “merited a second term.” If that was true, why not put it to the test, allowing those randos we call “the voters” to decide?

Biden had something like 14 million votes in the Democratic primaries. No one else had any. His obvious dottiness wasn’t the reason, either. He never owned up to it — and if he had, he’d have to explain how a man too mentally enfeebled to be a presidential candidate could continue to serve as president.

In the debate with Donald Trump that began the slide to oblivion, Biden’s empty eyes and zombie-like groaning, we were told, had to be written off as a really bad night.

He said he was quitting the race because saving “our democracy” was more important than “personal ambition.” Now, I happen to agree that Biden retiring permanently to the basement of his Delaware home is a boon to American democracy. But that was true from Inauguration Day — why did he inflict his personal ambition on us for three and a half years?

I’m an analyst. I don’t prophesy the future, but I’m supposed to know why the president of the United States suddenly wakes up one morning and decides to give up his candidacy. So I’m going to run with a conspiracy theory, because why not?

I believe Biden — and his human walker, Dr. Jill, and that Kissingerian strategist, Hunter — all believed he deserved a second term, but were pushed aside by the two kingmakers who secretly run the Democratic Party: George Clooney and The New York Times.

That still doesn’t get us to Harris. She’s the vice president, not the alternate candidate. If Biden faltered, she would automatically inherit the presidency but not his primary votes or delegates. The Democrats could have opted for an open convention.

They have a strong bench, or so we keep hearing. For example, there’s California’s Gavin Newsom, whose hair alone should be declared a national monument. There’s Hillary Clinton, who keeps banging against the glass ceiling like that annoying moth outside your window. And there are others, like Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, who are the best potential candidates of all because no one outside their immediate family has heard of them.

Instead, almost on a dare, the shakers and breakers of the party settled on the one candidate who has consistently polled more poorly than the president, and who, like Biden, has made an eternal enemy of the English language.

Harris sounds like a kindergarten teacher who has forgotten her lesson — her words scatter and float away like helium balloons into the clouds. In a Washington, DC, rife with impostors and empty suits, hers is a truly authentic lightness of being.

Her abrupt elevation has been called “a coup,” but it wasn’t. There were no tanks running over rioting Biden diehards — and the Democrats are entitled to anoint anyone they wish for the candidacy. It’s their party, as they say.

But the rapidity of the swap startled many inside the power structure. We know Biden was surprised because he needed a second tweet after the withdrawal announcement, essentially saying, “Kamala for, you know, that thing.” We know Harris was surprised because that’s her normal state of mind. We know the Democratic presidential campaign, which Harris inherited, was totally befuddled because it set out at once to invent a whole new person to be known, henceforth, as “Kamala Harris.”

This pure abstinent creature had never been named “immigration czar,” had never been ranked “most liberal” in the Senate, had never donated to bail for violent criminals or advocated defunding the police.

It was telling, I should think, that the campaign preferred a Harris who had never done anything — a Harris who resembled a bout of amnesia, liberated from every memory of the past. Even with the assistance of a supine media, this replacement of a replacement is unlikely to catch on. If you want a blank slate, go for Whitmer. Harris, alas, is too memorable, in her own unique way.

Americans are eager to learn the political principles that motivate the new candidate. Her handlers, we have seen, would rather she not have any.

Her detractors seem equally divided between portrayals of Kamala the Airhead and Kamala the Communist. The two are not mutually exclusive, of course, but neither gets to the essence of the matter. The ideology espoused by Harris is technically labeled “California,” which academics define as “extreme performative endorsement of the latest thing.” It’s politics as fashion statement — as might be expected, a pastime of movie stars and the idle rich.

Thus Harris’ habitual attitude toward Israel has been condemnation: She boycotted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech to Congress, for example, and has made it plain she blames Israel, not Hamas, for the devastation in Gaza. These gestures have failed to influence the Israelis or change a single fact on the ground in Gaza — but it’s a cool look for the ruling class.

She’s also all in on racial identity, though in her karma chameleon way, she has sometimes chosen to emphasize the Indian ancestry of her mother, sometimes the black roots of her Jamaican father — making her, taken whole, the ideal woman of many colors.

When, in 2020, Joe Biden declared he was looking for someone “of color and/or a different gender” as the chief qualities for his vice president, Harris had all the bases covered.

In the spirit of fashionable segregation, her campaign has organized supporters into groups according to race and sex: “Black Women for Kamala,” “White Women for Kamala,” “Latinas for Kamala,” etc. My favorite category is “White Dudes for Kamala,” which met online under the auspices of that rugged exemplar of Caucasian manhood, Pete Buttigieg. The first speaker, apparently, was a black dude.

But we shouldn’t make too much of this. The latest thing in California is never the latest thing for the United States of America. Harris seems aware of this troubling fact, and has already tiptoed away from previous stands on border funding, a fracking ban and Medicare for All.

I wouldn’t be surprised if her next online support group turned out to be “E Pluribus Unum for Kamala” — she’s a political chameleon on a journey across a treacherous landscape, non-California America, and she will continue to change colors to blend in with the unfamiliar background.

Whatever one thinks of these unusual tactics, they appear to be effective. Relieved to have a candidate who doesn’t drool in front of the cameras, the Democrats feel re-energized. The media, of course, have already crowned Harris Coconut Queen of the Universe.

The pollsters are talking about a significant bump in her favor, regaining much of the ground the doddering Biden had lost. It’s even odds that she will defeat Trump and become our next president. Maybe better, since the power and the glory of American culture, from Harvard to Hollywood, has aimed an immense monophonic Bronx cheer at the heedless Trump.

And here I return to my initial observation: Kamela Harris, president? Evidently, I have slipped into an alternate dimension of time and space, a region where the laws of probability have been abolished.

I offer these facts for your consideration.

Harris has no personal following. Why should she? She wasn’t going anywhere. She has no entourage of trusted experts to enlighten her on the issues — the experts were buzzing around Biden, who was supposed to be the candidate until he wasn’t. Her personality, in public, is comical, and in private it hasn’t exactly been a magnet to party activists or intellectuals.

By all accounts, her staff hate her and go running for the doors at the first opportunity. Her name isn’t closely identified with a particular cause or issue.

She’s a pretty terrible politician. She underperformed as a vote-getter in deep blue California. She self-detonated before the first primary when, in 2020, she sought the presidential candidacy on her own merits.

As might be expected from someone whose words break free of Earthly gravity, she’s a wretched debater. What Tulsi Gabbard did to her in the 2020 Democratic debates was horrifying to watch — the oratorical equivalent of Bambi vs. Godzilla. Her campaign never recovered from the thrashing.

Harris is like that feather in the wind at the end of “Forrest Gump.” She’s a historical accident. That, in less than four months, she could be the most powerful human on Earth, decider between war and peace, her manicured fingers flitting casually over the nuclear button, fills me with awe and astonishment over the inscrutable perversity of our age.

Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst who writes about the relationship between politics and media. He is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia and is a contributing writer to the center's Discourse magazine.

https://nypost.com/2024/08/05/opinion/accidental-rise-of-kamala-harris-symptom-of-an-unserious-age/

Exagen Strong Second Quarter 2024 Results: Raises Guidance

Exagen Inc. (Nasdaq: XGN), a leading provider of autoimmune testing solutions, today reported financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2024.

Highlights:

Recognized record total revenue of $15.1 million in the second quarter of 2024.
Delivered gross margin of 60.1% in the second quarter of 2024, compared to a gross margin of 58.7% in the second quarter of 2023.

AVISE^® CTD trailing twelve-month average selling price (ASP) of $401, a 25.3% increase over the trailing twelve-month ASP in the second quarter of 2023.

Net loss of $3.0 million in the second quarter of 2024, a 40.8% improvement over the second quarter of 2023.

Adjusted EBITDA loss of $1.6 million for the second quarter of 2024, a 53.5% improvement over the second quarter of 2023.

Cash and cash equivalents were $24.5 million as of June 30, 2024.
https://www.biospace.com/exagen-inc-reports-strong-second-quarter-2024-results-raises-guidance-due-to-record-performance

How far the stock market has to fall to trigger a circuit breaker

A big drop in the S&P 500 could lead to a pause on trading

Traders woke up to a sharply lower stock market on Monday morning and a spike in volatility. The Dow DJIA opened 2.7% lower, the S&P 500 SPX opened 4.2% lower and the Nasdaq Composite COMP opened 6% lower. The Cboe Volatility Index VIX was up around 25%.

This quick drop left some traders wondering if we'd see a built-in stock market feature for especially volatile trading days - a circuit breaker.

Circuit breakers temporarily halt trading across all exchanges when a specific security or market index moves too much in either direction. This is meant to slow down panic selling or panic buying.

Circuit breakers have multiple levels that get triggered when the security or market index move a certain pre-set percentage. These levels differ slightly depending on whether its a limit up-limit down circuit breaker for a single stock, or marketwide circuit breaker for the S&P 500.

For the S&P 500, these are the three levels that trigger a circuit breaker:

Level 1: a 7% dropLevel 2: a 13% dropLevel 3: a 20% drop

When the S&P reaches a level 1 or level 2 circuit breaker, trading is paused for 15 minutes. When it reaches level 3, trading is halted for the day.

The last time a circuit breaker was triggered for the S&P 500 was March 18, 2020 during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic selloff. A circuit breaker was triggered on four separate trading days during that selloff. Those days were March 9, 12, 16 and 18. There hasn't been a marketwide circuit breaker since.

The S&P 500 doesn't appear to be in danger of tripping a marketwide circuit breaker in early afternoon trade but remains sharply lower on the day. The index was down 2.7% in recent action near 5,203 after trading at a session low of 5,119.26 shortly after the opening bell.

The Dow remains down around 965 points, or 2.4%, after falling 1,238 points at its session low. The Nasdaq Composite remained down 3%

https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20240805143/heres-how-far-the-stock-market-has-to-fall-to-trigger-a-circuit-breaker

Putin's Top Defense Officials Are In Tehran Amid Countdown To Zero Hour

On Monday as the Middle East approaches zero hour of Iran's expected major retaliation attack on Israel, there is a Russian defense delegation in Tehran, and a US defense delegation in Tel Aviv. How is that for symmetry among enemies?

Sergei Shoigu, Russia's ex-Defense Minister and current national Security Council secretary, is meeting with senior Iranian military and security officials, as well as newly sworn-in president Masoud Pezeshkian.

Russia's RIA Novosti news agency described the focus of the talks as "strengthening bilateral cooperation in a wide range of spheres including security" - and the meetings come amid growing speculation that Russia is actively helping the Islamic Republic to thwart potential Israeli attacks.

Russia has "strongly condemned" the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last Wednesday. Iran considered the brazen act as tantamount to assassinating an official head of state while on an official visit. President Pezeshkian has meanwhile hailed Moscow as a "valued strategic ally."

There has of late been much speculation that President Putin is ready to give greater support to America's rivals and enemies in the Middle East as 'payback' for Washington's support to Ukraine over the past more than two years.

Also on Monday, the Israeli military confirmed that head of US Central Command, General Michael Kurilla, is in the country to assess the security situation against the backdrop of the potential attack from Iran.

Kurilla met with Israeli army chief, Lieutenant-General Herzi Halevi, and "held a joint situational assessment on security and strategic issues, as well as joint preparations in the region, as part of the response to threats in the Middle East," according to a statement carried in Israeli press.

Both Israel and Iran have been rallying global allies to their respective sides. Iran on Monday announced it has called for an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to discuss the assassination of Haniyeh and to gain support for a military response. That meeting is planned for Wednesday.

The Guardian has said Tehran officials will at the meeting attempt convince Arab nations to give political backing to its right of retribution. This strongly suggests in the meantime that a major attack likely won't come Monday or Tuesday, but the anticipation could stretch into later this week.

The same publication notes that Biden is "due to meet his national security team in Washington at 2.15 pm local time, approximately 10pm in Tehran, by which time it is likely to be clear if Iran is planning to launch an attack overnight."

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/putins-top-defense-officials-are-tehran-amid-countdown-zero-hour