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Beijing Wants AI To Be Made In China By 2030 (nytimes.com)
Reader cdreimer writes: According to a report on The New York Times (may be paywalled, alternative story here): "If Beijing has its way, the future of artificial intelligence will be made in China. The country laid out a development plan on Thursday to become the world leader in A.I. by 2030, aiming to surpass its rivals technologically and build a domestic industry worth almost $150 billion. Released by the State Council, the policy is a statement of intent from the top rungs of China's government: The world's second-largest economy will be investing heavily to ensure its companies, government and military leap to the front of the pack in a technology many think will one day form the basis of computing. The plan comes with China preparing a multibillion-dollar national investment initiative to support "moonshot" projects, start-ups and academic research in A.I., according to two professors who consulted with the government about the effort."
China's leadership thinks ahead for longer than the next election or the next quarter. AI, green energy, you name it.
Now we the USA, are looking to go back. Bring back coal, mundane factory jobs, .... and then when - not if - we fall behind, we'll have to blame some other boogeyman or the same: immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, liberals and their Librul ways....
This is what America really cares about -> "Hey look! Two transgender guys using the women's restroom to get married and have an abortion with their AR-15s!"
That's the problem.......you should have eaten cake.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Someone pointed out to me that the first jobs lost to computers were not unskilled jobs, they were the highly skilled jobs of people who were very, very good at math (a job that was known, not coincidentally, as a "computer"). Even today, computers can calculate the trajectory of a rocket going to the moon far more easily than they can fold laundry. So you shouldn't think that AI will first replace low-skilled jobs. One of the most common attempts at applying AI has been diagnosis by doctors. That's not a low-skill job.
The Chinese workforce becomes more and more skilled every year. They have time to adjust.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No evidence of Chinese leadership's awsome planning.
They know how to do one thing: Manipulate their currency. In the next 10 years, they will learn that using exchange rate to maintain 100% industrial utilization is NOT a way to run an economy. Sure their industrial utilization is 100%, but they overpay, massively, for everything they get from overseas. Plus domestic perverse economic incentives, bubbles everywhere, build empty cities etc. Plus no experience in Africa, so actually expect returns on those investments. Rather they will get 'expropriation' and called 'colonialists'.
They're in for the rogering of the century. There are _no_ simple economic metrics that a nation can just target. Unintended consequences happen, babes in the capitalist woods.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Either you have to keep the people happy with handouts or you need to get rid of the people...
Or maybe, just maybe, it will be exactly like what has happened with every other historical advance in productivity: the economy will expand, new jobs will be created, and living standards will improve.
China is building Skynet. America is building the F-35.
China's leadership thinks ahead for longer than the next election or the next quarter. AI, green energy, you name it.
Pretty much anything you can say about China is more complicated than a one sentence summary including this one. Sometimes their leadership is indeed forward thinking but they aren't really the brilliant strategists you seem to be implying. They have huge problems and just like us they have smart people (and more of them) working on solutions to those problems. I assure you they have plenty of folks in leadership and elsewhere who are very happy with the status quo and are just as afraid of change as some Americans are.
Now we the USA, are looking to go back. Bring back coal, mundane factory jobs,
No, just the more ignorant and selfish and loud among us. Most of us are too busy working on the future to worry that much about trying to recreate a long gone past.
and then when - not if - we fall behind, we'll have to blame some other boogeyman or the same: immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, liberals and their Librul ways....
Only some of us. We've been like that for the entire existence of America. We're a nation of immigrants, many of whom seem to forget that fact routinely. We're both immensely fair minded and brutally bigoted. We are the land of opportunity but make it needlessly hard for many to realize that opportunity. We're still conflicted about race and gender issues though our constitutional ideals on the topic are clear. In short we're a complicated and not always logical bunch but we've done pretty well overall. Watching America is like watching sausage being made - not a pretty thing to observe but the end result is often pretty great.
Right. Because this proved true in the last 150 years of 10,000 years of human history it can never prove false.
Productivity improvements have been occurring for a lot longer than 150 years. Agriculture has been around for 10,000 years. Writing, paper, concrete, and steel are all technologies invented more than a thousand years ago.
Can you name any productivity improvement, ever, that did not lead to higher living standards?
Most AI-chicken-littles predicate their doom-and-gloom on the assumption that only "the rich" will have access to new technology. The same predictions were made about cars, personal computers, and even washing machines. Yet today, car ownership is widespread, and billions of people have a computer in their pocket. There is no reason to believe the future will be different. It is not just "the rich" that have Siri on their cellphones. Household robots will almost certainly be designed for the mass market, not the 1%.
Can you name any productivity enhancing technology, ever, that has been used solely by "the rich"?
They are run by engineers, who have achieved and maintained 100% industrial utilization by manipulating the exchange rate. That much is basically not in dispute.
How that will work out, long run, is an open question. Things are interesting.
Take for example the Shanghai stock exchange. One day they realized...holy shit, our stock exchange had an average PE ratio of over 100 and is falling fast...so they _ordered_ all companies to declare increased profits to bring the ratio down, while putting hard limits on stock sales...I don't even trust NYSE accounting, I sure don't trust Chinese company accounting.
Babes in the capitalist woods. This will end in revolution if they're not very careful.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Well of course if you limit yourself to only "improvements" then by definition they all lead to improvement in the standard of living.
Bullcrap. An "improvement in technology" is not DEFINED as an "improvement in living standards". They are two different things. The first generally leads to the 2nd, but that is not by "definition". The claim of the techno-pessimists is the opposite: That improving tech will lead to lower living standards for many people.
Here's an invention that did not lead to improvement in standards of living: religion.
Religion brought order and structure to tribal societies. Tribes with religion out-competed and out-survived tribes without religion.
USSR stole the fission bomb. They figured out the hydrogen bomb (which is far more complex) on their own, and they did quite a bit on their own with rocket & space engineering.
You tend to think of the loss of manufacturing as not a big thing.
I have worked in manufacturing for nearly 30 years and my day job is running a manufacturing company. Sorry to disappoint you but American manufacturing is alive and well and doing better than ever and that is unlikely to change any time soon. What has changed is the composition of the sorts of things made in America. America has a manufacturing economy that is worth somewhere around $3 Trillion/year and growing. Our manufacturing sector by itself is about the same size as the GDP of Great Britain and larger than the entire economy of India and over double the GDP of Russia. It would be one of the 5 or 6 largest economies in the world. And yet people foolishly think that US manufacturing is on the decline because their Happy Meal toy was made in China. The difference is that we make stuff like jet engines and medical devices and mining equipment instead of plastic toys and beach towels.
You need to understand the difference between labor intensive and capital intensive. Labor intensive products are those whose cost includes a high percentage of labor, particularly unskilled labor. These sorts of products (think stuff you buy at Walmart or clothing) left America for good because our labor costs are simply too high. Some went to China some went elsewhere. As China's labor costs rise those products will go where labor is cheaper. The stuff made in america is capital intensive where automation and technology play a larger role. It's very much akin to what has happened in farming over the last century and a half. American agriculture produces more than ever but the percent of the population who work directly in agriculture has fallen to single digit percentages. The same thing is happening in American manufacturing. The percent of the workforce that builds things will be smaller but those that remain are and will continue to be far more capable and productive. The days of being able to make a large salary working an assembly line with nothing more than a high school diploma are dead and gone. Now if you want to work in manufacturing you had better bring something extra to the table.
China and other parts of Asia are undergoing a great rennisuance driven by the incredible wealth derived from manufacturing.
You say this as if it is something new. This has been going on for decades and it's fine. Read about the Asian Tigers and their success and growth since the 1950s. Read about the development of Japan since WWII and the panic in the US over Japan during the 1980s. China is the latest and given that they have 20%+ of the world population we should reasonably expect them to play a big role in the world's manufacturing economy. It's not going to kill us. None of this is anything new and all it means is that the US is going to have to compete to continue to thrive and we're certainly capable of doing that. China isn't going to put the US out of manufacturing any more than the US put Germany out of manufacturing. New players just change the mix is all based on their comparative advantages. China will become more technologically sophisticated and the US will have to work hard and invest smartly to deal with that. It's one of the reasons our idiotic policies on immigration (particularly those on the political right but some of the left too) are so foolish. We've got 1/5 the population of China so to compete we should be doing everything we can to encourage the smartest and hardest working people around the world to immigrate to the US.
The production of tangible goods really still is king. By and large the west is running massive trade deficits with the east. In effect, this means that wealth is continually being siphoned out of the country.
As I said before, it is WAY more complicated than y