> When I was younger I used to think more negatively about jobs, I even called it the jobs problem in my 2019 agentic coding startup template. I have since come around, the point of a society is the flourishing of its inhabitants.
That’s the key. The world is a delicate fabric that changes over time.
It’s nice (or frustrating) reading opinions. Forecasting the future is tricky.
While the world and us humans waste our time arguing, conflicting or dreaming, earth and the universe can easily introduce earthquakes, meteors and other unforeseen events that will have more impact than human made events we already cannot completely forecast.
since they did not state the obvious, I will.
a stable society is strong, it's stability is founded on contingency planning, which must be backed up with excess reserve capacity, maintaining that capacity requires
the will to resist the greed and avarice of those who would steal the reserves required to survive a contingency.
The chinese call this "the turning of the wheel", the wheel bieng society/civilisation
and loosing "the mandate of heaven" was essentialy a political statement, but there is something much worse they refer to, along with that, when the "princes fail in there duty" and society is no longer maintained, and becomes obsessed with luxury and debauchery, and wild excess, military adventurism, and neurosis.
more than 3 millenia of observation is behind what may seem to be simplistic or fatalistic, unrealistic, but anyone who thinks that red button mandarins are gone
is fooling them selves.
the most devistating thing china has done, is to not vie for the mandate of heaven and accept that final judgement of what is.
I was expecting a more nuanced article that talked about the “Suez Moment” in America but this is basically a (not even a good) critique of deindustrialization.
I don't expect anything from the guy who declared self driving cars are easy, everyone is just doing it wrong, and he could do it better in a just a year; 5 years ago.
The fame totally went to his head :P It is somewhat common issue for Nobel award winners, in this case the scope is limited "I am great at security and reverse engineering, that makes me an expert for anything IT related".
Nobel Nacre.. The nobelprize is hyper destructive to the scientists receiving it. Its hard to one up from there or return to your field- everyone is bombarding you with high expectations. You can only fail after you received olympic gold. Thus, as scientists inflict change on society, and society hates change, it is like a oyster, trying to protect itself from a grain of sand, wrapping it in Nacre, protecting itself from further change, by encapsulating the changing factor which remains neutered from its ability to do science.
Self-driving cars are easy though, 12-year-olds make them in high school STEM classes. You just give it a light sensor so it can follow a strip of white tape down the middle of the "road" and let it go from one place to the other.
Oh, until it hits an obstruction.
Okay well you add some sort of bumper switch to it so if it hits an obstruction it stops and backs up, to find a route round it.
Ah right, well, let's see, that didn't work so well when the obstruction was much smaller and squashier than the car.
Let's have some sort of distance sensors that - ah bollocks, they pick up everything including objects beside the road, and stop the car.
Okay what about some sort of camera and machine vision system? Great, that lets it "see" the road ahead and steer or brake to avoid obstacles! But it turns out it now needs to understand a bit of physics, at least enough to stop it booting it wide open through a sharp bend and ending up shiny side down.
Right so now it will drive at a sensible speed through bends, use a camera to look for obstructions, LIDAR to look for obstructions too, and it can actually follow road markings quite well, and even pick up speed from signs.
Ah. It can't actually be used around other vehicles because it can't anticipate what they're going to do, and keeps getting into bad situations that it then needs to brake and swerve to avoid.
Oh well, turns out self-driving cars aren't easy after all.
Yeah it's a very short-sighted article. Taking a quote like this:
> I can’t believe those who seriously try and say America’s value is in consuming.
as a case against outsourcing manufacturing really doesn't understand the value that societies create when they are on the forefront of innovation.
Maybe, just maybe, at a certain point physical labour is not the best way to use your working population, but instead, you know, services, innovation, etc?
America has been doing pretty good in that regard over the past few decades.
(For disclosure, I'm not from America, but still think this is a silly article)
China is at the forefront of innovation. America is not, except for financial innovation a.k.a. the best ways to get money out of people without doing actual work.
They’re transitioning to the forefront of innovation, but they’re definitely not at the forefront yet. They’re good at implementing things, not yet innovation.
They desperately do need to do that, though, because manufacturing alone isn’t going to grow their economy any further, as wages in China are already becoming high enough that they’re becoming less attractive to foreign investors.
China is a the forefront of catching up. Don't mistake that for innovation. China isn't building the best chips, that's Taiwan with really Netherlands doing the hard part. China is catching up to European car makers except they've largely caught up to Tesla in the powertrain (I partly blame that on Americans boycotting Tesla for silly political reasons). In the AI space obviously China is just running after playing catch up. Biology, catch up. Chemistry, catch up. Physics, catch up.
Despite my handle I am not Chinese lest I am accused of harboring any bias. Anyway, I decided to look up what is going on. Apparently, things are nuanced. On the one hand China lags behind when it comes to semiconductors, large commercial aircraft, some pharmaceutical innovation. On the other hand,
> When evaluating the top 10 percent of high-quality scientific publications, ASPI finds that China surpasses the United States across all 8 critical technology domains. The gap is particularly pronounced in the energy and environment domain, where China accounts for 46 percent of top-tier publications compared to just 10 percent for the United States. Despite U.S. leadership in AI, China produces more top publications, contributing 30 percent versus 18 percent for the United States[0]
Basically, China dominates in batteries, solar, quantum communications, robotics deployment, high-speed rail, nuclear construction, autonomous vehicle deployment, manufacturing process innovation, patent volume in most categories
China is the world leader in Drones, Electric vehicles, Batteries, Solar Panels, Electronics, Robotics, High-Speed Rail, Industrial equipment, Nuclear energy, Telecommunications Equipment, Cameras, Shipbuilding, Scientific research, rapid mobile payments.
Tied for AI, Smartphones
Semiconductors, rockets, and aerospace are probably the only sectors china is behind in.
China is the most technologically advanced society on earth. They are far far ahead of anyone else in using technology to make society easier. Many government services can be handled easily on your phone.
I think it's less about blaming us for boycotting Tesla and more about blaming us for letting our entrenched interests in both oil extraction and ICE cars prevent us from investing in EV development and switching to them faster.
>I partly blame that on Americans boycotting Tesla for silly political reasons)
China taking over the EV market was always going to happen. for instance, BYD sold (tens of thousands of) their first EV a decade before Musk went from le wholesome space man to le evil nazi man.
besides, I don't think being boycotted by the terminally online folx has had much impact. luxury brands just don't do well during a recession, and the market for Tesla - US and Europe - is not doing so good, to put it mildly.
> I partly blame that on Americans boycotting Tesla for silly political reasons
What would be different in Tesla’s output if Americans didn’t start boycotting Tesla less than 2 years ago?
And I’m glad you think killing at least half a million kids in Africa to not even save any money, stealing all our social security data, etc are just “silly political reasons”.
> What would be different in Tesla’s output if Americans didn’t start boycotting Tesla less than 2 years ago?
Car companies do better if they sell cars. They also find it easier to sell cars if owning said car doesn't make you fearful some crazy person will smash it because of identity politics.
> And I’m glad you think killing at least half a million kids in Africa to not even save any money, stealing all our social security data, etc are just “silly political reasons”.
Oh, I'm not. But hurting Tesla and putting a break on saving the planet will do what exactly? Absolutely jack shit.
It's like that story about the guy who made nice Game Boy clones, and people figured out he was an arms dealer originally and started a campaign to boycott the Game Boy clone. What will this accomplish? Destroying someones moral and good business will force them to go back to their evil business. It's counterproductive as hell.
Tesla is not saving the planet and not necessary to save the planet.
The whole idea that this one company must be protected from any competition and fed money and support is absurd. Add to it the years of lies Musk engaged in and his nazi affiliations ... it is tripple absurd.
The US does a terrible job trying to throw government cash at problems. See: Solyndra, PPP, the US’s inability to build ships, or most recently the debacle of Biden’s $7.5B rollout of EV chargers that only managed to build a few dozen stations in 3 years.
This is exactly how the opportunities were passed up. I am convinced its in no small part because of the unrealistic expectations of a very high success ratio with a small number of experiments. The US throws a lot of money at relatively few bets while China funds entire competitive markets at smaller scales and lets the ecosystem vet them.
There is also political alignment in funding next generation technologies even if it's disruptive of established industries. Lobbying of fossil fuel industry did not stop renewable factory investments in China. Whereas in the US any failure of a renewable investment was highlighted by fossil fuel lobbyists as a pretense to stop the investments
> Take the Mythos vulnerability finding thing. They didn’t just point Mythos at the codebase and say go, they built a harness where they asked it about each piece of code and if it was vulnerable. They triaged and spent more time looking at things that were flagged more, until eventually they passed it up to “uppper management” aka the people.
> You could imagine building this exact same thing with humans. Educate them, get them to sit at a desk, read code, find vulns. Actually, I can only really imagine that in China, have you seen the current graduates from the American universities?
Imagine, sure.
But why didn't anyone? I don't think it is a question of quality, though China simply being more populous than the USA* means there are more people at any given competence in any given domain, but cost, both monetary and opportunity.
AI's cheap. It would still be cheap compared to a human even if it cost 3000 USD/month for the token limit we get from the 20/month subscription.
It's not a question of quality. If you wanted quality, a motivated team of humans still can't be beat.
That's why you may notice that in making AI, companies still use teams of highly motivated humans. Obviously they could have AIs holding the reigns of other AIs. Nothing technical is stopping them
A problem with politics now is it becomes a debate on Trump and sidesteps existential problems that we're facing and in favor of dunking on the other party. Stocks are going up when manufacturing isn't and the clumsy tarrif system we slapped on top of our economy isn't going to right the ship. I think the article is on the right track as we probably need more jobs related to building physical goods and not inflating the price of financial products. I'm just not sure if it goes far enough into a positive vision on what we should do to correct that.
It’s typical to complain about AI slop that hits the front page here, but it’s worth noting that a lot of the (presumably) human-written content is slop in its own right.
This piece was some self-indulgent rambling that didn’t really have any connective threads.
> I read an article a while back about how, basically because labor unions became too much of a pain to deal with, they were just cut out of the conversation.
> This isn’t like when stuff is made in China. Those are basically American factories, just located in another country where you don’t have to negotiate with American labor.
I guess you do need to be socialist to formulate that first sentence in the active instead of passive voice or wonder how it even was possible that America could build American factories in other countries without negotiating with any labor (American or of the other country).
The part that is also missing is how China gladly took all the outsourced jobs, said "thanks guys!" and used them to become the rivaling power to the US it is today.
> It’s interesting how America believes in these apocalyptic AI narratives while China doesn’t.
As the rest of the article alludes to, America is a services economy [0]. An industrial economy obviously doesn't have anything to fear from AI because their jobs don't primarily involve pressing buttons on a keyboard to justify their paycheck. That probably explains most of the difference; for China I'd imagine more AI -> More prosperity.
> A human is about 20 petaflops. All of this installed compute is only about a million people.
The number of effective humans might only be around a few million people. Gauss and Euler did a bit more for society than the average 20 petaflops of human flesh. One of the lessons of history is that being able to reliably connect a few really good humans has a lot more potential than a moderate number of more easily confused ones.
There are a lot of smartest cow in the herd phenomenons out there. Even a few hundred thousand AIs would probably outnumber the senior politicians of the world and reducing the damage those politicians do would be a huge win. Gargantuan. Possibly species level impacts like we've never yet seen if a major power like China did it.
> Oh sorry sorry, in a preemptive strike they obviously would have hit us if we didn’t attack them first. Yes yes, defensive preemptive attack. It’s just bullying. It’s stupid.
And I'm probably packing too much into one comment, but you can tell everyone knows this is stupid because the politicians consistently have to use lies instead of trying to argue things on the merits. As soon as people have to try and connect the actual facts to someone who isn't corrupt being better off the argument collapses. The worst people are the ones in the grip of that team-sports emotion where they just support "their side" despite the fact that a policy of war hurts the side engaging in it. The warmongers aren't even on the same side, they're their own lobby of psychopaths.
[0] A term which might be in for the "third world" euphemism treatment, but you never know.
The article is certainly firebranding, but the core tenet strikes a valid point: how has the US lost the plot within such a short time? How did it go from the flag bearer of freedom and progress to isolationist bully that wants to invade Greenland and become best friends with Russia?
From the outside it is really hard to comprehend. Was it FoxNews that poisoned the American mind or the social media brainwashing? How can a society allow a billionaire to cut programs in Africa that saved hundreds of thousands of lives that cost pennies when compared to any military adventures.
> how has the US lost the plot within such a short time? How did it go from the flag bearer of freedom and progress to isolationist bully that wants to invade Greenland and become best friends with Russia?
American culture has lost its near-monopoly on optimism. We're now almost as cynical as the Europeans. (:D)
That cynicism means civic disengagement, technological doomerism and general symptoms of depression. That collectively degrades the mostly bottom-up structures we've long relied on, requiring shifts to less-efficient (and hastily cobbled together) top-down command structures.
It seems like the US never really reovered fully from the Civil War, and the undercurrent of racism has just been allowed to fully come to the surface with social media.
America has never been that. With everyone having access to apps like TikTok, the brainwashing stopped working as well and people can see that it isn't.
> TikTok was a Chinese app that had no qualms against shooting Americans what their country does
If one wanted deeply pessimistic takes on America and Americans, there has been a media market for that since at least the advent of cable news. Mistaking TikTok, one expression of a phenomenon, for the general trend is mistaking a tree for a forest.
There has historically been a lot of US-critical content manufactured by the US, which normally deflects criticism towards individual failings, external enemies, or surrogate political effigies. A few examples: Falling Down, Bulworth, American Beauty, all the other 90s/00s media critical of suburbia, 24, The Daily Show. Most of these are left-coded, I’m not as familiar with the right-coded stuff (I usually tuned it out) but from what I can tell it’s usually aimed against foreigners and weak/effiminate liberals. 2010s/20s race activism made “white people” into the effigy for the first time, but that’s still a deflection.
Pre-sale TikTok was the first time that a mirror was held up to US politics from a global perspective, where the masses could get a less fitered and channeled understanding of how they are seen by the world. (Reddit provided this previously but it has fewer users and less impact.)
As much as I hate TikTok and short videos, it had a big impact. There’s a reason that they forced the sale. Domestic control of mass media consumption is the primary method by which public opinion is shaped within the US.
America has absolutely been all of that and more within living memory. The problem is it's getting to the point where you need to be pushing 50 to remember a time when this was the case.
The Chinese are not worried about AI taking anyone's job. In fact they're excited by it.
For some reason, there is this unbelievably thick air of paranoia in America where everyone is just waiting for the day when their job will go away. To a point where I think it should be classified as mass hysteria and looked into by public health authorities.
We should all introspect why so many of us perceive America as this very delicate thing that is hanging on with borrowed time and will fall apart at any moment. Because I don't think it's actually like this.
To be fair, losing your job in America is a lot scarier than in most countries; especially when your whole industry is affected and your skill set has become obsolete. There’s not much of a social safety net to catch you.
The belief that there is no safety net is also part of the paranoia that I'm referring to. America is actually one of the most welfarist states in the world.
If your judgment of "badly distributed" comes from all the homeless people that you see, those people have fallen through like a dozen safety nets to get to that point and most of them cannot be helped.
You could literally hire a full-time dedicated team of 10 social workers and mental health professionals to care for 1 crazy SF hobo and it still wouldn't turn around their lives, they're too far gone.
You never see the iceberg of people who are successfully helped by American welfare.
This guilt is baseless and part of this mass hysteria.
I used to work at the American office of a Chinese company. Our counterparts in China earned about half as much as we did in the Bay Area (which is a top-tier salary in China and attracts the best people). On the surface there is really no reason for a Chinese tech company to set up an engineering office in the US. And yet many of them do.
One of my colleagues asked our manager whether he thinks our jobs in the US were stable because the teams in China cost so much less. The manager just said the talent quality is still a bit better in the Bay Area so it's worth it. That sounds like a tautology, but I think there's something deeper.
The problem in America is that a lot of companies have started thinking of talent as a "toll", a cost that you need to pay to get things done. If you think of it as a toll, then your objective becomes how to minimize it. I think that's wholly the wrong perspective.
> For some reason, there is this unbelievably thick air of paranoia in America where everyone is just waiting for the day when their job will go away
That is not just an AI problem. AI is just worsening a problem in USA society.
For years in the USA losing your job was not that big of a deal, because there were lots of other jobs to do, and they paid well.
The paranoia comes from the fact that people are discovering they have not saved anything and the jobs they need to merely survive (not even prosper anymore) are less and more difficult to obtain.
Hence the perceived value of the job you have is greater, and losing it looks worse.
The American dream was Homer Simpson, a simpleton with a huge house to his name, supporting a family as the (mostly) single earner. Today Homer would not be able to buy his own house, nor support his family.
Being poor is expensive. You have to pay rent for a house that will never be yours, often replace cheap things that break more often than the more expensive ones.You need money to make money, and that reinforces how money is essentially a zero-sum game. For billionaires to make even more, someone else has to make less.
TL;DR: It's not just AI. Americans are getting poorer. Poor is scary. And they don't have any social net like more socialist countries.
That reason would be the constant proclamation of such by business leaders, and these days, especially by AI company executives.
Just yesterday Elon Musk was in the news again for making noise about the need for a Universal Basic Income, with the clear implication of massive job market disruption.
A reason for the thick air of paranoia is that now, everyone knows someone that has been laid off. Simply so many that it is starting to hit home. Estimates are near 2008, and if you lived through that you know that help is not coming on a timescale that you could have to massively change your life.
You lose your job, two years go by, time to sell you your house and move. Hiring is a total circus right now as well, being subjected to a five course hiring obstacle course is a lot of time that you're burning your savings and or missing other opportunities. Compare this to nearly any time since 2012 when it was at most three, and maybe ONE was a technical.
Most people do not save in America, and even when you are employed the health care system does not take great care of you. All of this "choice" is presented as capitalism working, but really it's a set of land mines where two large entities decide how much they want to take from you (the hospital, and the insurance company). Since the pricing is opaque and the amount the insurance company pays is capricious, vaya con dios.
The line feels like don't get sick, and your own country has thrown you to the wolves (they're in on it). Similar to unemployment, and the other "safety nets" not managed centrally or well. Massive delays, and your mortgage is due.
Also, you are paying for all of these safety nets all the time when you are making money, but it is deeply gated when you need it. Sorry for the paragraphs, but watching a friend go through this now and it's very wild.
If you're able to save more than 10%/m, you are very ahead of the game.
As for USA losing the Mandate of Heaven, even people from other countries seem sad to see it happening. Informally, two different groups of Portuguese people I've talked to in the last two weeks in Lisbon had a sentiment of "how could this have happened to such a great country?" Mostly due to the extreme news reports coming from the US, ICE, war, rhetoric etc.
Have you ever been to Hong Kong? Despite having a crazy expensive real estate market, there really is no visible homelessness. I've lived in Hong Kong for 10 years and I can't recall seeing a homeless person even once. (To the extent they exist, it's heavily stigmatized and they hide out of sight, in tents in the woods.)
What's more:
> "it is the Government's housing policy to provide public rental housing (PRH) to low-income families who cannot afford private rental accommodation"
Yes, America is a declining empire, but it has nothing to do with the reasons listed.
Decades of capitalist cruelty has created a social environment so toxic it enabled a clique of conmen to rise to the top.
Now, American hard and soft power are both being dismantled at a rapid pace. Former allies and trade partners are working around the US instead of with it now. It's leadership position has been abandoned, for no good reason at all.
The internal rot is being projected onto the global stage and I don't think Americans quite understand the consequences yet.
The US Empire has reached the limit of its capitalistic mode of production. Now is time for Americans to consider the next step of any industrialised capitalist society; scientific socialism. It did wonder for China, Vietnam, and many more, and it can do wonders for the American people too.
Except that America is not, and never has been, capitalist. Much like socialism or communism, capitalism has never been achieved. The closest I know any society to have come is the USA between the late 1860s and 1913. Yet, that still wasn’t a capitalist society. Half of the country was under military occupation, people were forced to segregate by law, and the USA was conquering people militarily and committing genocide in the Philippines. For capitalism to exist, people would be sacrificing in the present for investment in the future in a free market. There are no free markets, and the world operates under financialism where the future is sacrificed for the present via debt based currency and debt based capital markets. The most free market of the last 70 years has been information technology, and that is slowly changing. As it becomes regulated, the monopolies become entrenched, innovation slows, homogenization is enforced, and products undergo a diminution in quality as monopolies needn’t compete.
To this day, capitalist leaning societies outcompete socialist leaning societies. Just don’t go saying that either has ever truly existed. Socialism and capitalism are utopian fantasies. People are messy and our systems are too.
Good? Things like crypto and the current usa administration should have thought us that completely free markets are ripe for corruption and insider trading. None of that produces anything, and merely concentrates and ties together power and capital.
> As it becomes regulated, the monopolies become entrenched, innovation slows, homogenization is enforced, and products undergo a diminution in quality as monopolies needn’t compete
All of that happens because we let the monopolies do the regulation, and limit and block any antitrust action.
When people talk about a "free" market, they mean "free as in fair".
When billionaires talk about "free" market they actually mean "free as in deregulated".
capitalisn is a strawman. America is a classital liberal society. Much of capitalism follows from that, but the message of freedom is where it starts. Marix didn't dare argue against freedom ever though that was his goal so he invented capitalism as a strawman he can knock down.
> When I was younger I used to think more negatively about jobs, I even called it the jobs problem in my 2019 agentic coding startup template. I have since come around, the point of a society is the flourishing of its inhabitants.
That’s the key. The world is a delicate fabric that changes over time.
It’s nice (or frustrating) reading opinions. Forecasting the future is tricky.
While the world and us humans waste our time arguing, conflicting or dreaming, earth and the universe can easily introduce earthquakes, meteors and other unforeseen events that will have more impact than human made events we already cannot completely forecast.
So... What's your point? Sounds like what you identify as key is not relevant to the remainder of your comment.
since they did not state the obvious, I will. a stable society is strong, it's stability is founded on contingency planning, which must be backed up with excess reserve capacity, maintaining that capacity requires the will to resist the greed and avarice of those who would steal the reserves required to survive a contingency. The chinese call this "the turning of the wheel", the wheel bieng society/civilisation and loosing "the mandate of heaven" was essentialy a political statement, but there is something much worse they refer to, along with that, when the "princes fail in there duty" and society is no longer maintained, and becomes obsessed with luxury and debauchery, and wild excess, military adventurism, and neurosis. more than 3 millenia of observation is behind what may seem to be simplistic or fatalistic, unrealistic, but anyone who thinks that red button mandarins are gone is fooling them selves. the most devistating thing china has done, is to not vie for the mandate of heaven and accept that final judgement of what is.
I was expecting a more nuanced article that talked about the “Suez Moment” in America but this is basically a (not even a good) critique of deindustrialization.
I don't expect anything from the guy who declared self driving cars are easy, everyone is just doing it wrong, and he could do it better in a just a year; 5 years ago. The fame totally went to his head :P It is somewhat common issue for Nobel award winners, in this case the scope is limited "I am great at security and reverse engineering, that makes me an expert for anything IT related".
Nobel Nacre.. The nobelprize is hyper destructive to the scientists receiving it. Its hard to one up from there or return to your field- everyone is bombarding you with high expectations. You can only fail after you received olympic gold. Thus, as scientists inflict change on society, and society hates change, it is like a oyster, trying to protect itself from a grain of sand, wrapping it in Nacre, protecting itself from further change, by encapsulating the changing factor which remains neutered from its ability to do science.
> self driving cars are easy
Self-driving cars are easy though, 12-year-olds make them in high school STEM classes. You just give it a light sensor so it can follow a strip of white tape down the middle of the "road" and let it go from one place to the other.
Oh, until it hits an obstruction.
Okay well you add some sort of bumper switch to it so if it hits an obstruction it stops and backs up, to find a route round it.
Ah right, well, let's see, that didn't work so well when the obstruction was much smaller and squashier than the car.
Let's have some sort of distance sensors that - ah bollocks, they pick up everything including objects beside the road, and stop the car.
Okay what about some sort of camera and machine vision system? Great, that lets it "see" the road ahead and steer or brake to avoid obstacles! But it turns out it now needs to understand a bit of physics, at least enough to stop it booting it wide open through a sharp bend and ending up shiny side down.
Right so now it will drive at a sensible speed through bends, use a camera to look for obstructions, LIDAR to look for obstructions too, and it can actually follow road markings quite well, and even pick up speed from signs.
Ah. It can't actually be used around other vehicles because it can't anticipate what they're going to do, and keeps getting into bad situations that it then needs to brake and swerve to avoid.
Oh well, turns out self-driving cars aren't easy after all.
Yeah it's a very short-sighted article. Taking a quote like this:
> I can’t believe those who seriously try and say America’s value is in consuming.
as a case against outsourcing manufacturing really doesn't understand the value that societies create when they are on the forefront of innovation.
Maybe, just maybe, at a certain point physical labour is not the best way to use your working population, but instead, you know, services, innovation, etc?
America has been doing pretty good in that regard over the past few decades.
(For disclosure, I'm not from America, but still think this is a silly article)
China is at the forefront of innovation. America is not, except for financial innovation a.k.a. the best ways to get money out of people without doing actual work.
They’re transitioning to the forefront of innovation, but they’re definitely not at the forefront yet. They’re good at implementing things, not yet innovation.
They desperately do need to do that, though, because manufacturing alone isn’t going to grow their economy any further, as wages in China are already becoming high enough that they’re becoming less attractive to foreign investors.
China is a the forefront of catching up. Don't mistake that for innovation. China isn't building the best chips, that's Taiwan with really Netherlands doing the hard part. China is catching up to European car makers except they've largely caught up to Tesla in the powertrain (I partly blame that on Americans boycotting Tesla for silly political reasons). In the AI space obviously China is just running after playing catch up. Biology, catch up. Chemistry, catch up. Physics, catch up.
Where is China leading?
Despite my handle I am not Chinese lest I am accused of harboring any bias. Anyway, I decided to look up what is going on. Apparently, things are nuanced. On the one hand China lags behind when it comes to semiconductors, large commercial aircraft, some pharmaceutical innovation. On the other hand,
> When evaluating the top 10 percent of high-quality scientific publications, ASPI finds that China surpasses the United States across all 8 critical technology domains. The gap is particularly pronounced in the energy and environment domain, where China accounts for 46 percent of top-tier publications compared to just 10 percent for the United States. Despite U.S. leadership in AI, China produces more top publications, contributing 30 percent versus 18 percent for the United States[0]
Basically, China dominates in batteries, solar, quantum communications, robotics deployment, high-speed rail, nuclear construction, autonomous vehicle deployment, manufacturing process innovation, patent volume in most categories
[0] https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outper...
China is the world leader in Drones, Electric vehicles, Batteries, Solar Panels, Electronics, Robotics, High-Speed Rail, Industrial equipment, Nuclear energy, Telecommunications Equipment, Cameras, Shipbuilding, Scientific research, rapid mobile payments.
Tied for AI, Smartphones
Semiconductors, rockets, and aerospace are probably the only sectors china is behind in.
China is the most technologically advanced society on earth. They are far far ahead of anyone else in using technology to make society easier. Many government services can be handled easily on your phone.
> They are far far ahead of anyone else in using technology to make society easier. Many government services can be handled easily on your phone.
This is just a side effect of using technology to control the population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit_system
Is this wrong?
https://insideevs.com/features/719015/china-is-ahead-of-west...
I think it's less about blaming us for boycotting Tesla and more about blaming us for letting our entrenched interests in both oil extraction and ICE cars prevent us from investing in EV development and switching to them faster.
>I partly blame that on Americans boycotting Tesla for silly political reasons)
China taking over the EV market was always going to happen. for instance, BYD sold (tens of thousands of) their first EV a decade before Musk went from le wholesome space man to le evil nazi man.
besides, I don't think being boycotted by the terminally online folx has had much impact. luxury brands just don't do well during a recession, and the market for Tesla - US and Europe - is not doing so good, to put it mildly.
Its owner being a nazi white supremacist is "silly political reason" now? Oh my...
> I partly blame that on Americans boycotting Tesla for silly political reasons
What would be different in Tesla’s output if Americans didn’t start boycotting Tesla less than 2 years ago?
And I’m glad you think killing at least half a million kids in Africa to not even save any money, stealing all our social security data, etc are just “silly political reasons”.
> What would be different in Tesla’s output if Americans didn’t start boycotting Tesla less than 2 years ago?
Car companies do better if they sell cars. They also find it easier to sell cars if owning said car doesn't make you fearful some crazy person will smash it because of identity politics.
> And I’m glad you think killing at least half a million kids in Africa to not even save any money, stealing all our social security data, etc are just “silly political reasons”.
Oh, I'm not. But hurting Tesla and putting a break on saving the planet will do what exactly? Absolutely jack shit.
It's like that story about the guy who made nice Game Boy clones, and people figured out he was an arms dealer originally and started a campaign to boycott the Game Boy clone. What will this accomplish? Destroying someones moral and good business will force them to go back to their evil business. It's counterproductive as hell.
Allowing chinese vehicles into the US would do more for saving the planet, if that's your goal.
No one forced Elon to kill a million Africans. He could have just like, not done that.
Tesla is not saving the planet and not necessary to save the planet.
The whole idea that this one company must be protected from any competition and fed money and support is absurd. Add to it the years of lies Musk engaged in and his nazi affiliations ... it is tripple absurd.
I don't quite see the Suez Crisis analogy quite working because China (the rising power) is not really involved against the US (the waning power).
China is selling the world solar panels while the US is making gas unaffordable.
The US passed up multiple opportunities to fund its own more foundational solar industry
The US does a terrible job trying to throw government cash at problems. See: Solyndra, PPP, the US’s inability to build ships, or most recently the debacle of Biden’s $7.5B rollout of EV chargers that only managed to build a few dozen stations in 3 years.
This is exactly how the opportunities were passed up. I am convinced its in no small part because of the unrealistic expectations of a very high success ratio with a small number of experiments. The US throws a lot of money at relatively few bets while China funds entire competitive markets at smaller scales and lets the ecosystem vet them.
There is also political alignment in funding next generation technologies even if it's disruptive of established industries. Lobbying of fossil fuel industry did not stop renewable factory investments in China. Whereas in the US any failure of a renewable investment was highlighted by fossil fuel lobbyists as a pretense to stop the investments
> Take the Mythos vulnerability finding thing. They didn’t just point Mythos at the codebase and say go, they built a harness where they asked it about each piece of code and if it was vulnerable. They triaged and spent more time looking at things that were flagged more, until eventually they passed it up to “uppper management” aka the people.
> You could imagine building this exact same thing with humans. Educate them, get them to sit at a desk, read code, find vulns. Actually, I can only really imagine that in China, have you seen the current graduates from the American universities?
Imagine, sure.
But why didn't anyone? I don't think it is a question of quality, though China simply being more populous than the USA* means there are more people at any given competence in any given domain, but cost, both monetary and opportunity.
AI's cheap. It would still be cheap compared to a human even if it cost 3000 USD/month for the token limit we get from the 20/month subscription.
That's the danger.
* by about 4x: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china%20population%2Fus...
It's not a question of quality. If you wanted quality, a motivated team of humans still can't be beat.
That's why you may notice that in making AI, companies still use teams of highly motivated humans. Obviously they could have AIs holding the reigns of other AIs. Nothing technical is stopping them
A problem with politics now is it becomes a debate on Trump and sidesteps existential problems that we're facing and in favor of dunking on the other party. Stocks are going up when manufacturing isn't and the clumsy tarrif system we slapped on top of our economy isn't going to right the ship. I think the article is on the right track as we probably need more jobs related to building physical goods and not inflating the price of financial products. I'm just not sure if it goes far enough into a positive vision on what we should do to correct that.
More sophomoric ramblings from this egotist.
That egotist got you to create an account to post that.
I think loads of people regularly create new accounts. Also the HN account creation process is quite painless.
It’s typical to complain about AI slop that hits the front page here, but it’s worth noting that a lot of the (presumably) human-written content is slop in its own right.
This piece was some self-indulgent rambling that didn’t really have any connective threads.
> I read an article a while back about how, basically because labor unions became too much of a pain to deal with, they were just cut out of the conversation.
> This isn’t like when stuff is made in China. Those are basically American factories, just located in another country where you don’t have to negotiate with American labor.
I guess you do need to be socialist to formulate that first sentence in the active instead of passive voice or wonder how it even was possible that America could build American factories in other countries without negotiating with any labor (American or of the other country).
The part that is also missing is how China gladly took all the outsourced jobs, said "thanks guys!" and used them to become the rivaling power to the US it is today.
> It’s interesting how America believes in these apocalyptic AI narratives while China doesn’t.
As the rest of the article alludes to, America is a services economy [0]. An industrial economy obviously doesn't have anything to fear from AI because their jobs don't primarily involve pressing buttons on a keyboard to justify their paycheck. That probably explains most of the difference; for China I'd imagine more AI -> More prosperity.
> A human is about 20 petaflops. All of this installed compute is only about a million people.
The number of effective humans might only be around a few million people. Gauss and Euler did a bit more for society than the average 20 petaflops of human flesh. One of the lessons of history is that being able to reliably connect a few really good humans has a lot more potential than a moderate number of more easily confused ones.
There are a lot of smartest cow in the herd phenomenons out there. Even a few hundred thousand AIs would probably outnumber the senior politicians of the world and reducing the damage those politicians do would be a huge win. Gargantuan. Possibly species level impacts like we've never yet seen if a major power like China did it.
> Oh sorry sorry, in a preemptive strike they obviously would have hit us if we didn’t attack them first. Yes yes, defensive preemptive attack. It’s just bullying. It’s stupid.
And I'm probably packing too much into one comment, but you can tell everyone knows this is stupid because the politicians consistently have to use lies instead of trying to argue things on the merits. As soon as people have to try and connect the actual facts to someone who isn't corrupt being better off the argument collapses. The worst people are the ones in the grip of that team-sports emotion where they just support "their side" despite the fact that a policy of war hurts the side engaging in it. The warmongers aren't even on the same side, they're their own lobby of psychopaths.
[0] A term which might be in for the "third world" euphemism treatment, but you never know.
The article is certainly firebranding, but the core tenet strikes a valid point: how has the US lost the plot within such a short time? How did it go from the flag bearer of freedom and progress to isolationist bully that wants to invade Greenland and become best friends with Russia?
From the outside it is really hard to comprehend. Was it FoxNews that poisoned the American mind or the social media brainwashing? How can a society allow a billionaire to cut programs in Africa that saved hundreds of thousands of lives that cost pennies when compared to any military adventures.
> how has the US lost the plot within such a short time? How did it go from the flag bearer of freedom and progress to isolationist bully that wants to invade Greenland and become best friends with Russia?
American culture has lost its near-monopoly on optimism. We're now almost as cynical as the Europeans. (:D)
That cynicism means civic disengagement, technological doomerism and general symptoms of depression. That collectively degrades the mostly bottom-up structures we've long relied on, requiring shifts to less-efficient (and hastily cobbled together) top-down command structures.
I disagree that the loss of optimism is causative. I've lost my optimism because I've seen what we're capable of as a country and it's not reassuring.
It seems like the US never really reovered fully from the Civil War, and the undercurrent of racism has just been allowed to fully come to the surface with social media.
It hasn't been a short time, it's been a gradual process. I would look for example at the trust in congress over time.
https://www.pew.org/en/trend/archive/fall-2024/americans-dee...
America has never been that. With everyone having access to apps like TikTok, the brainwashing stopped working as well and people can see that it isn't.
> with everyone having access to apps like TikTok, the brainwashing stopped
The ad-powered social media addiction stopped brainwashing?
TikTok was a Chinese app that had no qualms against showing Americans what their country does.
> TikTok was a Chinese app that had no qualms against shooting Americans what their country does
If one wanted deeply pessimistic takes on America and Americans, there has been a media market for that since at least the advent of cable news. Mistaking TikTok, one expression of a phenomenon, for the general trend is mistaking a tree for a forest.
There has historically been a lot of US-critical content manufactured by the US, which normally deflects criticism towards individual failings, external enemies, or surrogate political effigies. A few examples: Falling Down, Bulworth, American Beauty, all the other 90s/00s media critical of suburbia, 24, The Daily Show. Most of these are left-coded, I’m not as familiar with the right-coded stuff (I usually tuned it out) but from what I can tell it’s usually aimed against foreigners and weak/effiminate liberals. 2010s/20s race activism made “white people” into the effigy for the first time, but that’s still a deflection.
Pre-sale TikTok was the first time that a mirror was held up to US politics from a global perspective, where the masses could get a less fitered and channeled understanding of how they are seen by the world. (Reddit provided this previously but it has fewer users and less impact.)
As much as I hate TikTok and short videos, it had a big impact. There’s a reason that they forced the sale. Domestic control of mass media consumption is the primary method by which public opinion is shaped within the US.
America has absolutely been all of that and more within living memory. The problem is it's getting to the point where you need to be pushing 50 to remember a time when this was the case.
The Chinese are not worried about AI taking anyone's job. In fact they're excited by it.
For some reason, there is this unbelievably thick air of paranoia in America where everyone is just waiting for the day when their job will go away. To a point where I think it should be classified as mass hysteria and looked into by public health authorities.
We should all introspect why so many of us perceive America as this very delicate thing that is hanging on with borrowed time and will fall apart at any moment. Because I don't think it's actually like this.
To be fair, losing your job in America is a lot scarier than in most countries; especially when your whole industry is affected and your skill set has become obsolete. There’s not much of a social safety net to catch you.
The belief that there is no safety net is also part of the paranoia that I'm referring to. America is actually one of the most welfarist states in the world.
Only if you include those countries without welfare.
If you look at those with welfare the US are pretty bad.
Lots of money but badly distributed
If your judgment of "badly distributed" comes from all the homeless people that you see, those people have fallen through like a dozen safety nets to get to that point and most of them cannot be helped.
You could literally hire a full-time dedicated team of 10 social workers and mental health professionals to care for 1 crazy SF hobo and it still wouldn't turn around their lives, they're too far gone.
You never see the iceberg of people who are successfully helped by American welfare.
I mean the efficiency.
How much of the money is for actual help and how much for the companies who exploit the system to enrich themselves.
> losing your job in America is a lot scarier than in most countries
Compared with China?
Yes. You can get unemployment insurance payout between 3 and 24 months:
https://msadvisory.com/china-social-security-system/
For example, if the local minimum wage in Shanghai is RMB 2,590 per month, the unemployment benefit would range between RMB 1,813 and RMB 2,072.
https://fdichina.com/blog/unemployment-insurance-in-china/
Do you think there is a level of guilt amongst some working Americans? A case of "I shouldn't be earning this much money for this little work"
This guilt is baseless and part of this mass hysteria.
I used to work at the American office of a Chinese company. Our counterparts in China earned about half as much as we did in the Bay Area (which is a top-tier salary in China and attracts the best people). On the surface there is really no reason for a Chinese tech company to set up an engineering office in the US. And yet many of them do.
One of my colleagues asked our manager whether he thinks our jobs in the US were stable because the teams in China cost so much less. The manager just said the talent quality is still a bit better in the Bay Area so it's worth it. That sounds like a tautology, but I think there's something deeper.
The problem in America is that a lot of companies have started thinking of talent as a "toll", a cost that you need to pay to get things done. If you think of it as a toll, then your objective becomes how to minimize it. I think that's wholly the wrong perspective.
> For some reason, there is this unbelievably thick air of paranoia in America where everyone is just waiting for the day when their job will go away
That is not just an AI problem. AI is just worsening a problem in USA society.
For years in the USA losing your job was not that big of a deal, because there were lots of other jobs to do, and they paid well.
The paranoia comes from the fact that people are discovering they have not saved anything and the jobs they need to merely survive (not even prosper anymore) are less and more difficult to obtain.
Hence the perceived value of the job you have is greater, and losing it looks worse.
The American dream was Homer Simpson, a simpleton with a huge house to his name, supporting a family as the (mostly) single earner. Today Homer would not be able to buy his own house, nor support his family.
Being poor is expensive. You have to pay rent for a house that will never be yours, often replace cheap things that break more often than the more expensive ones.You need money to make money, and that reinforces how money is essentially a zero-sum game. For billionaires to make even more, someone else has to make less.
TL;DR: It's not just AI. Americans are getting poorer. Poor is scary. And they don't have any social net like more socialist countries.
> For some reason
That reason would be the constant proclamation of such by business leaders, and these days, especially by AI company executives.
Just yesterday Elon Musk was in the news again for making noise about the need for a Universal Basic Income, with the clear implication of massive job market disruption.
It's pretty clear that Elon Musk suffers from sadism; edgelords tend to.
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> The Chinese are not worried about AI taking anyone's job. In fact they're excited by it.
Yea, because they are not a democracy, so power concentration and automated violence is a plus, not a minus.
Who are "The" Chinese?
Are you both talking about the same group?
A reason for the thick air of paranoia is that now, everyone knows someone that has been laid off. Simply so many that it is starting to hit home. Estimates are near 2008, and if you lived through that you know that help is not coming on a timescale that you could have to massively change your life.
You lose your job, two years go by, time to sell you your house and move. Hiring is a total circus right now as well, being subjected to a five course hiring obstacle course is a lot of time that you're burning your savings and or missing other opportunities. Compare this to nearly any time since 2012 when it was at most three, and maybe ONE was a technical.
Most people do not save in America, and even when you are employed the health care system does not take great care of you. All of this "choice" is presented as capitalism working, but really it's a set of land mines where two large entities decide how much they want to take from you (the hospital, and the insurance company). Since the pricing is opaque and the amount the insurance company pays is capricious, vaya con dios.
The line feels like don't get sick, and your own country has thrown you to the wolves (they're in on it). Similar to unemployment, and the other "safety nets" not managed centrally or well. Massive delays, and your mortgage is due.
Also, you are paying for all of these safety nets all the time when you are making money, but it is deeply gated when you need it. Sorry for the paragraphs, but watching a friend go through this now and it's very wild.
If you're able to save more than 10%/m, you are very ahead of the game.
As for USA losing the Mandate of Heaven, even people from other countries seem sad to see it happening. Informally, two different groups of Portuguese people I've talked to in the last two weeks in Lisbon had a sentiment of "how could this have happened to such a great country?" Mostly due to the extreme news reports coming from the US, ICE, war, rhetoric etc.
Imagine using Hong Kong as evidence of a good society and saying “No homelessness anywhere”.
One of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, where people are living 4-6 to the room.
This is simply expat navel gazing and little more.
Have you ever been to Hong Kong? Despite having a crazy expensive real estate market, there really is no visible homelessness. I've lived in Hong Kong for 10 years and I can't recall seeing a homeless person even once. (To the extent they exist, it's heavily stigmatized and they hide out of sight, in tents in the woods.)
What's more:
> "it is the Government's housing policy to provide public rental housing (PRH) to low-income families who cannot afford private rental accommodation"
> https://www.gov.hk/en/residents/housing/publichousing/index....
Sure, there's a wait-list, but it's available in principle to all of the needy.
Yes, America is a declining empire, but it has nothing to do with the reasons listed.
Decades of capitalist cruelty has created a social environment so toxic it enabled a clique of conmen to rise to the top.
Now, American hard and soft power are both being dismantled at a rapid pace. Former allies and trade partners are working around the US instead of with it now. It's leadership position has been abandoned, for no good reason at all.
The internal rot is being projected onto the global stage and I don't think Americans quite understand the consequences yet.
Providing healthcare isn't your employer's job it is something that comes from the government.
It is the original sin of the American healthcare system.
America was on the road to socialism from the 1930s to the 1950s but it all went to shit and here we are: back in the Gilded Age.
It was never on the road to socialism.
Social benefits doesn’t have anything to do with socialism
The US Empire has reached the limit of its capitalistic mode of production. Now is time for Americans to consider the next step of any industrialised capitalist society; scientific socialism. It did wonder for China, Vietnam, and many more, and it can do wonders for the American people too.
Except that America is not, and never has been, capitalist. Much like socialism or communism, capitalism has never been achieved. The closest I know any society to have come is the USA between the late 1860s and 1913. Yet, that still wasn’t a capitalist society. Half of the country was under military occupation, people were forced to segregate by law, and the USA was conquering people militarily and committing genocide in the Philippines. For capitalism to exist, people would be sacrificing in the present for investment in the future in a free market. There are no free markets, and the world operates under financialism where the future is sacrificed for the present via debt based currency and debt based capital markets. The most free market of the last 70 years has been information technology, and that is slowly changing. As it becomes regulated, the monopolies become entrenched, innovation slows, homogenization is enforced, and products undergo a diminution in quality as monopolies needn’t compete.
To this day, capitalist leaning societies outcompete socialist leaning societies. Just don’t go saying that either has ever truly existed. Socialism and capitalism are utopian fantasies. People are messy and our systems are too.
> There are no free markets
Good? Things like crypto and the current usa administration should have thought us that completely free markets are ripe for corruption and insider trading. None of that produces anything, and merely concentrates and ties together power and capital.
> As it becomes regulated, the monopolies become entrenched, innovation slows, homogenization is enforced, and products undergo a diminution in quality as monopolies needn’t compete
All of that happens because we let the monopolies do the regulation, and limit and block any antitrust action.
When people talk about a "free" market, they mean "free as in fair".
When billionaires talk about "free" market they actually mean "free as in deregulated".
You don't get "fair" without regulation.
capitalisn is a strawman. America is a classital liberal society. Much of capitalism follows from that, but the message of freedom is where it starts. Marix didn't dare argue against freedom ever though that was his goal so he invented capitalism as a strawman he can knock down.
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