Ex-Google Boss Eric Schmidt: US 'Dropped the Ball' on Innovation (bbc.com) 131
In the battle for tech supremacy between the US and China, America has "dropped the ball" in funding for basic research, according to former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. From a report: And that's one of the key reasons why China has been able to catch up. Dr Schmidt, who is currently the Chair of the US Department of Defense's innovation board, said he thinks the US is still ahead of China in tech innovation, for now. But that the gap is narrowing fast. "There's a real focus in China around invention and new AI techniques," he told the BBC's Talking Business Asia programme. "In the race for publishing papers China has now caught up." [...] Dr Schmidt blames the narrowing of the innovation gap between the US and China on the lack of funding in the US. "For my whole life, the US has been the unquestioned leader of R&D," the former Google boss said. "Funding was the equivalent of 2% or so of GDP of the country. Recently R&D has fallen to a lower percentage number than was there before Sputnik."
According to Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a US lobby group for technology, the US government now invests less in R&D compared to the size of the economy than it has in more than 60 years. This has resulted in "stagnant productivity growth, lagging competitiveness and reduced innovation". Dr Schmidt also said the US's tech supremacy has been built on the back of the international talent that's been allowed to work and study in the US - and warns the US risks falling further behind if this kind of talent isn't allowed into the country. "This high skills immigration is crucial to American competitiveness, global competitiveness, building these new companies and so forth," he said. "America does not have enough people with those skills."
According to Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a US lobby group for technology, the US government now invests less in R&D compared to the size of the economy than it has in more than 60 years. This has resulted in "stagnant productivity growth, lagging competitiveness and reduced innovation". Dr Schmidt also said the US's tech supremacy has been built on the back of the international talent that's been allowed to work and study in the US - and warns the US risks falling further behind if this kind of talent isn't allowed into the country. "This high skills immigration is crucial to American competitiveness, global competitiveness, building these new companies and so forth," he said. "America does not have enough people with those skills."
Really? (Score:2, Insightful)
In the battle for tech supremacy between the US and China, America has "dropped the ball" in funding for basic research, according to former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.
The US outsourced call its manufacturing to Chin and then convinced it self that US tech supremacy its guaranteed by god, that science is the enemy and that an education beyond what you need to read the bible is therefore fundamentally useless because what used to be US tech supremacy was built exclusively by high school dropouts anyway.
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- Google (and others) regularly outsource its tech to China "unwillingly" so China R&D cost is very low
- Education is pretty poop when everyone is thinking about race rather than tech at school
- Hiring is pretty poop when everyone is thinking about race rather than tech at work
- General workforce in tech companies spend a LARGE amount of time in various sensitivity training, changing word meaning, etc. (I don't disagree with some of it, it's just than when you spend half of your time on trying to figure
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All of which counts for a negligible fraction of
America's slippage.
The real problem is the takeover of tech businesses
by MBA's who care only about next quarter's stock price.
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The studies you cited indicated typical IQ losses due to fluoridation are in the 3 to 7.5 point range. In reaction to that, US maximum recommended levels have been reduced from 1.2 ppm to 0.7 ppm.
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No... no. An actual "My Precious Bodily Fluids" idiot here on slashdot?
I thought they were too stupid to use a computer.
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It is hardly surpricing (Score:5, Insightful)
Given than technology development requires long term commitment, but most US tech companies are led by MBAs that focus on results in this quarter, not long term.
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Like Eric Schmidt
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Like Eric Schmidt
The last time Eric Schmidt "innovated" was when he handed the original iPhone prototype to Andy Rubin.
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Like Eric Schmidt
At least he noticed when his new Chinese competitors jumped up and bit him in the balls.
Re:It is hardly surpricing (Score:4, Insightful)
Most MBAs I know care about month-to-month .. Quarterly is for the boardroom and C-Suite who have stock options.
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And let's not forget that the business model of most U.S. tech companies these days centers around losing money long enough to build - or acquire - a monopoly in some area based on 'free' or subsidized cheap services. Once those monopolies are in place, they don't need huge staffs, and even if they invest fairly heavily, a few huge companies doing R&D isn't enough to maintain a high level of innovation throughout US society. If you want a society that produces large numbers of innovators, you need lar
Well, yeah. (Score:5, Insightful)
Innovation doesn't make stockholders happy, nor does it improve retirement incomes in the short term - and those are the core motivations in the nation today.
We feed the interests of international retirement funds and short-term investments above everything else as a culture - and will sacrifice everything not directly feeding into either of those, if there is any perception it will improve those two things.
What will be fascinating to me is seeing how the next generations chooses to both take power, and alter those priorities in the next decade and change.
In the meantime, yeah - innovation has been very rare outside marketing and linear expansion of previous changes.
In previous generations we'd actually have cores of engineers working to coordinate scientists, universities, in massive tiered efforts with fascinating payoffs - now we get the rare Tesla or SpaceX showing off isolated features with trickles of plans that have to be market approved at each small step.
While it's true that progress is usually slow in any case - the market hasn't been the machine of innovation many imagined it would be... since that's not it's goal. Other interests compete for resources much more effectively in almost every case.
Ryan Fenton
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People need incentives in order to do things. Nobody is happy being a slave, working for free.
There are a few exceptions, where people with exceptional intellectual talents will do something for free if they have complete creative control. Such as volunteer open source developers, etc. But that kind of work cannot exist without the much more mundane jobs that produce the hardware, do people's taxes, grow food, produce electricity, and so on. You need all of it in order to have the self-actualizy parts o
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You almost never COULD "make major breakthroughs alone in your backyard". The stories they tell don't talk about the economics that enable the breakthroughs. In the early days it was either be rich yourself, or have a rich sponsor (i.e. a patron). I'll admit that "rich" just meant upper middle class back when labs were cheap, but in those days just about nobody qualified as "upper middle class".
When we look back at history we foreshorten things, and one "great innovator" per decade looks like a LOT. The
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Adjust the incentives so that vision and hard work offer a path to respect and a good life. That is the change needed. There are several major trends that have eroded the incentives connecting vision and hard work with respect and success. Scott Adams has explored many of them in Dilbert over the years. A major problem is treatment of engineering as labor that you can train anyone to do. The process of selecting highly talented and highly motivated people to design and build and discover is essential
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Everyone used to stand up against those kind of decisions and acted in long term interests as well. That simply does no happen any more, and mostly because today's generation of decision makers where poisoned by lead from the fifties till the eighties and they are brained damaged. Less moral and less thoughtful and really shite long term thinkers, just the way it is, they are a bunch of genitally obsessed greedy arseholes. When those arseholes die off, younger generations will be forced to clean up the huge
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Capitalism does not innovate (Score:5, Insightful)
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Private companies incrementally improve.
Is SpaceX Starship an incremental improvement over what we had?
Is the iPhone?
If they are, then is there anything that wrong with incremental improvement?
If they are not, doesn't that kind of defeat your argument?
I would love to hear just how you think innovation happens OUTSIDE capitalism.
The truth is that Capitalism is the pre-conditon for any actual innovation, because a state led solution would never take the risks required to truly innovate, except MAYBE in the ca
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iPhone was not a revolution. It was an evolution of already existing phones, with several competitors close behind.
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Musk’s SpaceX Looking to Compete for $16 Billion in Federal Broadband Subsidies [wsj.com]
Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies [latimes.com]
Commercial space companies have received $7.2 billion in government investment since 2000 [theverge.com]
Just to put things into perspective, NASA's budget is around $22B. Giving away "subsidies" that are a significant fraction NASA's total budget tells us that the private sector really isn't driving this new space race at all. It's graft, a new scam designed
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So no launches paid for by commercial entities......
SpaceX is a commercial entity.
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Wonder of wonders, a company that actually invests in something that requires time to become profitable.
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So Capitalism designed and built the Boeing B-47 (back when it was an engineering enterprise...) without NACA and captured Nazi wind tunnel data (Operation Paperclip) ? You know, the first proof-of-concept for swept wings and podded engines ? And its descendants, the C-135/B-707 ? And it built the first semiconductors and integrated circuits for aerospace, cleverly anticipating their use in consumer electronics ?
So SpaceX built the V-2 ? And Redstone (Operation Paperclip again, thank you Wernher von Braun)
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Re: Capitalism does not innovate (Score:2)
Those who think they know that are wrong. Apple made and makes steps in various directions, less wildly so than more courageous companies, and track what sticks. At least, since they don't have Jobs anymore to tell what needs to be done.
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Maybe Apple could in the past, but it won't, and probably can't anymore. Multiple reasons, some very well explained in the book "Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen. Then there is another reason, more current. As companies grow, they keep hiring more and more people, and there are only so many "superstars" out there. So you end up with larger and larger groups of progressively lower skilled workers, designing "by comity" (distributed responsibility means nobody is responsible), where most important
Outsourcing manufacture was disastrous (Score:5, Insightful)
Without end-to-end knowledge of manufacture, the expertise and knowledge required to design and develop new ideas just isn't there. You can't learn it in a college or university.
Up until now the US has managed to keep it's edge on innovation because of an old guard who still did have that kind of real-world manufacturing experience and so could come up with innovation and strong design, but as they start to retire, they are being replaced by a new guard who unfortunately haven't had the opportunity to develop that experience.
The ideas and designs this new guard propose are generally so naive and separated from reality that they may as well be smoking crack.
This is the reason why the tech sector in the US is mostly led by overblown advertising companies (Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc) and deep technological innovation is starting to fade.
Re:Outsourcing manufacture was disastrous (Score:5, Interesting)
+1. When I got my start about 20 years ago the entry level positions were in manufacturing. Once you cut your teeth and had exposure to how the manufacturing side worked you had a decent chance of moving to the design side if you show aptitude there, and it served me and the company very well. Very shortly after I moved over, they killed the manufacturing and relied entirely on their (cheaper) Malaysian plant to take over. There is no path now for anyone to arrive in R&D with any manufacturing experience, and boy howdy does it show.
We have a mentorship gap now. Job applicants are expected to show up with 10 years experience, but there are a lot fewer entry level jobs at which you can attain it.
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We should also have a decent manufacturing base for national security reasons. If China manufactures most stuff, we have no "spare" if there is a natural or human-made disruption in the supply chain.
Recreating a decent manufacturing base may result in more expensive products, but it may pay off during a crisis. Traditional economic theory down-played that for some reasons. Post-Covid economists may have a different perspective.
Maybe we can better partner with Mexico. They could focus on labor-intensive part
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Well, sanity was replaced by shareholder-value quite a while ago. Funny thing is that the US would be sure to lose a war with China (trade or otherwise), because it attacks its own manufacturing base in doing so. One thing the moron-in-chief is too dense and too uneducated to understand.
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The problem is a long-time in the making. Can't pin it all on the current guy.
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The problem is a long-time in the making. Can't pin it all on the current guy.
I did not say he caused the situation. I said he does not understand it.
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Prior Presidents didn't either. It was an experiment that went wrong. They hoped trade would open up China.
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It opened up commerce, not the political process. They are still an authoritative regime.
Re: Outsourcing manufacture was disastrous (Score:2)
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Freedom to travel and consume, yes, but their political rights are still mostly stifled. Although it does tend to go through cycles of heavy stifling and light stifling.
Re: Outsourcing manufacture was disastrous (Score:2)
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People need freedom from hunger before they appreciate freedom of speech
Which makes a threat of hunger a very nice tool to oppress people. Freedom is won in the rare instances where hunger gets second place. It is lost again over a longer time when hunger gets prioritized.
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Which explains why even though we produce far more food than would be required to eliminate hunger, a double-digit percentage of the U.S. population lives in hunger.
Freedom of speech is pesky. Get people to worry about other things...
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a double-digit percentage of the U.S. population lives in hunger.
Someone is lying to you with statistics. 12.3 percent of American households had difficulty at some time during the year in providing enough food for all their members (this is known as food insecure). It is not the same as living in hunger.
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Oh, great wise one, tell us the difference. I can't wait for vague handwaving claiming that some unreasonably large fraction of that 12.3% of American households only went hungry for some conveniently short period of time. Then will come the complete disregard for the millions of newly unemployed.
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some unreasonably large fraction of that 12.3% of American households only went hungry for some conveniently short period of time.
It literally does not say that. It does not say they went hungry at all. You misread it.
It's not unreasonable, considering the people who wrote the statistic did so with the intention to mislead you, but still, you have the skill to understand these things better.
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No, you have no concept of what "food insecure" officially means [usda.gov].
And there's the complete disregard for the millions of newly unemployed.
You're awesome.
Re: Outsourcing manufacture was disastrous (Score:2)
Which moron in chief? JFK? LBJ? Nixon? Ford? Carter? Reagan? Bush 1? Clinton? Bush 2? Obama? Trump?
None of them gave a hoot about having and maintaining a US manufacturing base. Trump said he cared, but whatever. That is clear by observing that the âoerust beltâ states started becoming apparent.
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"Maybe we can better partner with Mexico. They could focus on labor-intensive parts and the US on value-added parts or assembly."
So, what you are saying is that labor-intensive parts don't add any value?
Are you an USA-rian?
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I somewhat agree with you but. . .I suspect that manufacturing will come back and the blue collar workers won't be that happy about it. As manufacturing becomes more and more automated there is no reason to seek out locations with cheap labor. Therefore, overseas factories make less sense because there aren't labor savings that offset the shipping costs.
In the near future, a lot of commodity goods will be easily made on-site at a retailer with a 3D printer. Think about auto parts. A parts store has to house
U.S. dropped the ball? Or Google dropped the ball (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems to me that saying the U.S. dropped the ball on research is incorrect, when you look at companies like SpaceX and a variety of pharmaceutical advances from the U.S.
What stands out to me, is any lack of innovation from Google itself. It laments the lack of innovation while having more funding than almost any company to engage in such research - it even split itself into two companies so one could be *devoted* to research!
So where is that research Google? Or has all that time been squandered on bullshit we'll either never see or doesn't matter?
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Those are just some examples in highly visible industries. The percent of GDP put in to R&D is a much better metric of overall investment. It's also a sign of shifting domestic industry from product to service. So even if companies that innovate are still spending the same percent of revenue on R&D, their share of US GDP has shrunk. A lot of US "product" companies simply buy something from a Chinese OEM and put a logo on it these days. They're not spending to develop a product and push US based
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The percent of GDP put in to R&D is a much better metric of overall investment.
Why? That number seems to have very little correlation to results, because it does not speak to the efficient of R&D across companies, and industries.
A lot of US "product" companies simply buy something from a Chinese OEM and put a logo on it these days.
And a lot of supposed Chinese innovation is simply blatantly ripping off R&D from other countries. That's a much bigger issue, but one that is being solved by manufa
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You misinterpret the overall picture. Sure, there are still some high-visibility things done in the US, but the overall situation is dire. For example SpaceX only has what they have because most of the rest of the world (rightfully) thinks manned space missions are mostly a waste of money at this time. And what "pharmaceutical advances" are yo talking about? Getting a large part of the population hooked on prescription opiates?
Its easy to 'innovate' (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Its easy to 'innovate' (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Copying is not innovation. You're thinking that knowledge can be hoarded. And that America foolishly did not hoard their secrets.
Lockdown does not promote innovation. Openness does. Lockdown doesn't even maintain whatever edge there may be. It's really weird how so many Americans think we have some kind of monopoly on the ability to do science, and that no one else in the world can make the same discoveries. That's the kind of thinking behind such boneheaded moves as restricting the export of encryption technology. While you're sitting there jealously guarding important research findings, others can and will rediscover the same things and more, and leave you in the dust. Then you may see that all the lockdown did was hinder your own scientists and allow other nations to surpass you all the sooner.
A tradition of research, of exploration and curiosity, is what drives innovation. And there, in recent years, America has faltered. America still has that spirit, but anti-intellectualism has increased, and many politicians are openly scornful of education and science.
Another hugely important way America gained such a lead is another tradition, of freedom, especially academic freedom, and the protections ignorant mobs. Many scientists came to America to escape oppression in their home countries. Much of the rest of the world was only too happy to kick out their best and brightest.
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Imagine this:
Person A and Person B both work on solving a hard AI problem (i.e. "innovate").
Person B can see Person's A work and thoughts in addition to their own work.
Person A cannot see Person B's work.
Do you not think Person B has a huge advantage? This only works if both A&B share their work.
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You are thinking too individualistically. And too narrowly about "a", as in, just one problem. Think of it this way. Team A shares their work. Team B is not really a team, but a bunch of individuals who do not share their work with anyone, not even their own putative teammates. The individuals might even have among them every piece of a puzzle, but be unable to assemble the solution because they aren't cooperating. So, even though "Team" B can see Team A's work, they are forever playing catch up. The
From the “Shitty CEO Parent” (Score:3)
If only someone (Score:5, Insightful)
If only someone could have done something about supporting innovation in the USA. Someone who held the positions of CEO/COO at Novell, Sun, and Google, and sat on the board of directors of Apple, for example.
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Well, he is part of the problem, clearly. But he is still right and name-calling does not fix these problems.
Who benefits? (Score:2)
Part of the criticism of gov't funded R&D is that the research is publicly known and thus doesn't necessarily benefit the US economy compared to other countries. Foreign firms can read the same research.
If the Gov't of China wants to fund public R&D more so than the US gov't, perhaps one can say, "Go at it"; it's their dime and we can still read the results. They may do it for prestige; that's fine.
I'm not considering military R&D and private corporate R&D here. Those are different animals.
So Dr Schmidt (Score:5, Insightful)
If that is not the pot calling the kettle black.
The Globalist Billionaires sell out America and Americans when it comes to manufacturing and hiring and it is America and Americans fault. Got It!
I think the air is getting a little thin in the elites inflated heads and egos.
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this (Score:5, Insightful)
Coming from a STEM field, it seems funny that I would say this, but I remember what happened with the USSR. They were our match in science and engineering. If that had been the deciding factor, the US wouldn't be where it is today. We has roughly equal STEM strength, and so economics decided that contest. The USSR simply didn't have the right structure to pull the same level of productivity out of the people. Capitalism won that fight for us.
On the other hand, he's spot on about the immigration thing. Trump says that he's trying to keep out "murderers, rapists and jihadists". But what I see is foreign nationals who get their masters or doctorate in engineering. In past years, they would have all wanted to stay here, but now lots of them are deciding to go back home because they no longer feel welcome. The inventions that they might have come up with? Might have happened here, but not anymore. The productivity of their work? That will go to benefit ANOTHER country, not us. Any companies that they might start and jobs they might create? Gonna benefit somewhere else.
We need to make it easy for people to come here and be productive. The west was open. The USSR was closed. Who won? Why are we trying to break this winning strategy?
I know capitalism is unpopular right now in a lot of places, but the truth is that it's one of our main advantages over China. China is absolutely amazing, but THE AVERAGE US WORKER IS 3 TIMES AS PRODUCTIVE. Not 25% more. Not 50% more. Not twice as productive. TRIPLE productive. That's because our capitalist system is simply a superior economic model to whatever you want to call China's system. I would call it "mostly state-dictated capitalist" or "partly socialist" or something like that. China defies simple explanation, but it's clear that their system does NOT encourage the sort of hard-edged optimization that occurs in the US economy.
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I've personally seen the H1B system abused. The line between legitimate foreign nationals and cheap/docile labor-oriented corporate gimmicks needs better scrutiny.
For example, give the highest wage earners and the most educated the highest priority, and limit the number of guest workers per organization, especially of the same skill-set. And make sure they are paid properly and on time. I've seen visa workers wait 6 months for their check.
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This is the real world, where human systems are highly flawed and NEVER
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I remember what happened with the USSR. They were our match in science and engineering.
I disagree with you on that point. From what I remember and what I read, the Soviets lagged behind us in tech and weren't above engaging in espionage to catch up. I'd suggest the following for an intriguing read:
https://babelniche.com/2011/12... [babelniche.com]
"CVAX...When you care enough to steal the very best"
I do agree with your position on immigration.
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These days, China is pretty capitalistic too. Yes government-connected companies get special market advantages, but that is also true (to a lesser extent) in the US.
The productivity difference is not so much due to capitalism vs whatever else, and more to the fact that China started out much poorer so education levels are much lower, and there is no push to automate jobs when so much cheap labor is available. If China continues its economic rise, these factors will disappear over the course of the next few
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Yes, the US had better management, but that was only a small part of it. We had capitalist companies that were driven by the profit motive. They took the government R&D and turned it into useful products. They created new businesses and entire new industries that employed people, doing useful stuff. All of that activity generated wealth. Not only did it make the people happier, healthier
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In a sense, Communism is horrible management writ large, like "The beatings will continue until morale improves."
The problem is that such a description ignores the fundamental problem of oppression by focusing on the single aspect of production. By failing to wipe out the root flaw, new and superficially different forms of oppression pop up frequently.
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No matter how you cut it, this means that the average US worker is ROUGHLY triple as productive as the average Chinese worker. This is a generalization; clearly China has some super-strong companies and large numbers of absolutely top-notch people. However, the overall trend says 3:1 productivity. No way of getting around that.
Same all over the western world (Score:2)
Education, real science, all gone to hell and sacrificed on the altar of short-term profits. China used to not be any threat in that area, but that has changed. Not because they have gotten so much better, but because the west has gotten a lot worse.
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Seriously? (Score:3)
Sorry but Europe and the US are waaay ahead of China in almost every technology except maybe mass manufacturing.
Gene Editing. -- US & Europe invented it .. China hasn't even come up with many novel ideas of how to make it more efficient and accurate ... China has nothing even close .. China still can't make high thrust or high bypass turbofan jet engines .. still struggling to build the WS-15 even though they have detailed blueprints of similar Russian engines
GPU tech - nVidia and AMD are the only two companies
Immunotherapy & vaccines - Germany, UK, France, and USA easily lead -- anyone in the field knows it
Pharmaceuticals -- China rarely invents anything
Battery tech - See what Tesla announces Sept. 22
Self driving cars - USA is waay ahead
CPU design software - the top companies, Synopsys, Cadence, and Mentor Graphics are US based.
Architectural design software - US company AutoDesk AutoCAD
Computer Graphics & Design - Adobe Photoshop/AutoDesk Maya
Computer Game Engines: Unity and Unreal game engines are better than anything Chinese
Computer hardware/Mobile Phones: Apple
Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, iOS, Android
Rockets: SpaceX.
Airplanes: Boeing
Sorry where does China lead? What BS.
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Software is largely tied to spoken languages in terms of the UI and reading source code and documentation of existing libraries. It's one reason we outsource to India, which teaches English as a second language.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your attitude is PRECISELY what Eric Schmidt is talking about. You think that just because the US leads now, that some magical force would keep the US in the lead forever.
His argument is that China is CATCHING UP. Do you know what that means? It doesn't mean LEADING. Let's get to your specific, stupidly supported, examples:
Gene Editing. -- US & Europe invented it
So what? This isn't a competition about who invented what - it's completely irrelevant. There's nothing magical about being the first inventor of something that makes you immune from being overtaken.
Pharmaceuticals -- China rarely invents anything
So does the US. They know how to drive prices up for existing medications. It's just a bunch of Shkrellis who haven't been jailed for something unrelated.
CPU design software - the top companies, Synopsys, Cadence, and Mentor Graphics are US based.
How do you measure "top company"? If there are Chinese companies with their own software, would you know enough Chinese to use them? Or maybe they just use whatever tool they write to get the job done and see no purpose in monetizing their software tools for the global market?
Architectural design software - US company AutoDesk AutoCAD Computer Graphics & Design - Adobe Photoshop/AutoDesk Maya Computer Game Engines: Unity and Unreal game engines are better than anything Chinese
These are just nonsense comparisons. If there are Chinese companies with their own software, would you know enough Chinese to use them? Or maybe they just use whatever tool they write to get the job done and see no purpose in monetizing their software tools for the global market?
Rockets: SpaceX. ... China has nothing even close
Neither does the US. SpaceX is not a government agency. The US is so inept it has to use a private company to continue its space mission. China already has a space agency that is still capable of sending things into space - including sending a plant to the far side of the moon.
Computer hardware/Mobile Phones: Apple
Which is only possible because they are manufactured elsewhere. The US has no manufacturing capable of producing iPhones.
Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, iOS, Android
Sorry, why does the US and Europe get to claim ownership of Linux? Linux has many developers from China contributing code.
Airplanes: Boeing
The US is giving up a major lead in that one when it allows financial concerns to override safety concerns.
Basically, your argument comes down to your inability to read, leading you to make some statement about nationalistic pride - pride in something you had a small to no part in creating. The question is how long will it take for China to catch up, or in fact, focus on some other direction because some things aren't worth boasting about (game engines, seriously?).
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China leads in manufacturing of tech hardware. Drones, phones, displays, etc.
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Note, regarding airplanes I'm pretty sure Airbus surpasses Boeing by a far margin. It's not China based, but also not US based.
We taught them (Score:3)
What did the US think was going to happen when we've spent decades teaching all of their top people here in American universities?
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Better question:
What did the US think was going to happen when all the big sharks snapped up all the little fish, and then ran out of fish to eat?
Or, put simply, how does a reduction in the number of competitors in a given playing field increase competition?
That's as far as I go.
It's clear what happened. (Score:2)
US decided to invest most of its R&D in software and apps, rather than anything that was capital intensive, chasing the next "unicorn" that they would be able to sell on wall street for billions. After all, to build an app, you just need an office and 100 programmers, vs having e.g. a robust chip making sector that requires billions of dollars to buy the latest and newest equipment. Meanwhile Asia has invested in capital intensive sectors. There's a reason why e.g. TMSC is ahead of Intel in fab capab
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See here - Table 2:
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf... [nsf.gov]
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And who capitalizes such research? It's rare that money goes to capital intensive industry. That's a fact. Most capital and "angel" investors don't touch capital intensive industry and focus solely on software and apps. Research that actual require spending is now being mostly capitalized by Asia as they are willing to invest in what would be considered low margins.
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The chart doesn't really tell us anything. E.g. what was ratio before 2018? E.g. Is the manufacturing R&D going down as a ratio? E.g. in 1997 industrial R&D compared to non-industrial was 19.5%. This in in despite the fact that non-industrial research is more likely cheaper, and not capital intensive. Why has federal R&D spending as a share of the economy has fallen almost in half, to 0.73% of GDP in 2013 from 1.2% in 1987.
Moreover how much r&d is being spent on NEW technologies, for th
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Where's the data that shows US investments in renewables as a % of GDP have declined?
Where's the data shows the R&D ratio going down over the years?
Where's the data that shows Huawei and Cisco are apples-to-apples in every other way, for your comparison to be meaningful (i.e., you glossed over the fact that Huawei is like Cisco + Motorola [when they made real phones] + Lucent + Qualcomm). For th
It helps to steal (Score:1)
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US is renowned for using its enormous spying machinery to steal secrets from competitors around the world, all for the benefit for private companies, like when they spied on an European plane maker.
Also, unable to keep up, US is turning to using bullshit security laws to block competition from entering US, thus creating unfair advantage for domestic companies.
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PHB doesn't realize he is a PHB (Score:2)
The source of many a Dilbert strip.
China IP Theft (Score:1)
In a multicultural society like the US, identifying Chinese operatives is exceedingly difficult. China, on the other hand, can easily identify outsiders and has no shame about restricting their access to secrets.
Isn't it convenient that Schmidt also ignores the half century effort by the US to pour money into China while eliminatin
Ban the MBA (Score:2)
And anyone with an undergrad in business, and an MBA, needs to be escorted to the door, and they're *not* qualified to be a greeter at ChinaMart, as a friend of mine refers to it.
Is it really that surprising? (Score:2)
Looking at this from abroad, this is hardly surprising. The US has transformed a lot the last decades.
Science is no longer respected and pushed - a large part of the population rejects basics like evolution and the Big Bang based on their own religious superstition. A large part - partly overlapping - also rejects science because facts like global warming, how epidemics spread etc have become politics where your political standpoint matter more than the science underlying it.
On the other side, you have
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