Is China Outsmarting America in AI? (nytimes.com) 163
An anonymous reader shares an NYTimes article: Beijing is backing its artificial intelligence push with vast sums of money. Having already spent billions on research programs, China is readying a new multibillion-dollar initiative to fund moonshot projects, start-ups and academic research (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source), all with the aim of growing China's A.I. capabilities, according to two professors who consulted with the government on the plan. China's private companies are pushing deeply into the field as well, though the line between government and private in China sometimes blurs. Baidu -- often called the Google of China and a pioneer in artificial-intelligence-related fields, like speech recognition -- this year opened a joint company-government laboratory partly run by academics who once worked on research into Chinese military robots. China is spending more just as the United States cuts back. This past week, the Trump administration released a proposed budget that would slash funding for a variety of government agencies that have traditionally backed artificial intelligence research.
Is this article clickbait? (Score:1)
Answer on your phones; now
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You must be one of those that kept digging to reach China.
Yes ... (Score:2, Troll)
... it is.
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I point out our flaws because I love America and want us to be the best we can be. Sticking our collective heads in the sand is not going to solve anything.
Can't tell (Score:1)
Strong AI doesn't exist yet, so no, no one is outsmarting anyone when developing true AI.
If we're talking about AI being equal to computer programs as marketing tends to do, then no, because American tech companies are the most valuable in the world.
AI is not a wise thing to spend money on (Score:1, Troll)
Every year we keep stupidly claiming that AI is just around the corner. Every year we are disappointed.
The truth is we have tricked ourselves. The rapid pace of Moore's law (computing power keeps doubling) has created incredible simulations. But paintings and statues do NOT spontaneously come alive, no matter how accurately they simulate a person. Neither do computer chips.
There is a fundamental difference between real AI and what computer chips can do. The ability of computer chips to parse written, a
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Re:AI is not a wise thing to spend money on (Score:5, Insightful)
In all fairness, I believe you are conflating AI with AGI.
Artificial intelligence has been dramatically improving at a staggering pace and is focused on singular tasks. Artificial "General" Intelligence is still nowhere to be seen on the current technological horizon, and would allow a computer to be amazing at any number of tasks.
That has not stopped writers, who earned their IT chops in a movie theater, from repeatedly suggesting that any AI that can drive a car or beat a World Master Go player is just steps away from initiating a discussion about its personal dreams and ambitions.
Re:AI is not a wise thing to spend money on (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that you misunderstand what "artificial intelligence" means. John McCarthy, the person who coined the term in 1956, defined it as making machines "behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving." It explicitly does not require machines to be sentient. It does not require the machine to follow the same "thought processes" that a human would when performing that action. When a human plays chess, or translates a document into a different language, or drives a car down a street while obeying traffic laws and not hitting anything, everyone agrees they are displaying intelligence. Therefore when a computer does the same thing, that counts as artificial intelligence. That's been the standard definition of the term for the last 60 years.
If you want a computer to be sentient, that's something completely different. We're nowhere near being able to do that. We aren't even sure how to define what that would mean. But that isn't what the term "artificial intelligence" means.
Re: AI is not a wise thing to spend money on (Score:1)
So everyone is wrong since the 60s. Fortunately he posted his comment on slashdot so we can now all update our definition of AI to match his that is obviously the good one.
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Human brains aren't exactly reliable either, so apparently that's not a requirement for the "I" part.
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John McCarthy, the person who coined the term in 1956, defined it as making machines "behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving."
The problem with that definition is that human intelligence and AI are very different beasts. A human who is capable of multiplying 8-digit numbers in a matter of milliseconds would be considered intelligent by most, or at least very talented. Does that make calculators AI?
... or drives a car down a street while obeying traffic laws and not hitting anything, everyone agrees they are displaying intelligence
Not really. Creating AI that could drive a car is very very hard, but you wouldn't put "can drive a car" in the skills section on your resume. Likewise, "cleaning the room" and "picking fruits" are not considered highly intelligent work
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I guess you missed the memo - AI isn't around the corner, it's already here and widely used. Maybe ask the many industries that depends on it if they're disappointed, or think the research was wasted.
Your "no true Scotsman" definition of AI isn't anywhere near, and likely never will be if you keep trying to redefine it as "alive" or "not a computer chip", but that's ok, real researchers weren't trying to simulate a person anyway (well, except maybe Kurzweil & his dad).
What they're (successfully) creatin
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So you'd add "not running a program" to the list of requirements in your personal definition, next to "not a computer chip". Why not just say "must be a human brain"? It's no less arbitrary, and no less unrelated to actual research.
Do you also define "learning" as requiring biology, since your meaning of the word apparently excludes a dozen existing fields [wikipedia.org]?
Re:AI is not a wise thing to spend money on (Score:4, Interesting)
Every year we keep stupidly claiming that AI is just around the corner. Every year we are disappointed.
The truth is we have tricked ourselves. The rapid pace of Moore's law (computing power keeps doubling) has created incredible simulations. But paintings and statues do NOT spontaneously come alive, no matter how accurately they simulate a person. Neither do computer chips.
Indeed. But most people fall for cargo-cult, i.e. they cannot distinguish things that look similar on the outside. Apparently, actually understanding how something works requires advanced human intelligence, and it seems only something like 10% of the population has that. Hence the stupid claims.
There is a fundamental difference between real AI and what computer chips can do. The ability of computer chips to parse written, audio, and visual information is amazing, and keeps growing but it is NOT real AI and will never be.
While I sort-of agree at this time, there is a small, residual change that the physicalists are right and that humans are only advanced automatons. But it does indeed not look like it at all. A lot of research has not produced any credible theory how general intelligence (true/strong AI) could be created and it clearly is not a question of computing power. For example, the only thing we have that approaches strong AI in still a very limited field is automated theorem proving. But this one gets bogged down in complexity so early, that a smart human being can do things that a computer the size of the whole universe cannot do.
And there is the elephant in the room, constantly ignored by Neuro-"science": Consciousness. Observable only together with intelligence, and nobody has any idea what it is or how it works. In fact, current Physics does not allow it, as there is no mechanism for it. Saying it is an "emergent property of complexity" is just bullshit and akin to claiming it is "magic". Now, is two things are getting observed only together, a sound assumption is that they are facet of the same thing. Yet that also gets ignored by those that predict strong AI "anytime soon".
Computers will shortly be able to accept input via camera and microphone as accurately as they get it from a keyboard or mouse. That is not real AI. Nor is the amazingly complex search functions and databases we have created.
They are useful, and worth investing in, but more money has been wasted on them than is appropriate.
The term usually used these days is "weak AI". Weak AI was historically called "automation" and it is the "AI" without intelligence.
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You're suggesting that human brains are somehow non-physical? That's... extremely unlikely.
It's true that brains are complicated. There's an awful lot of connections and state involved in the neural networks in them, all of which are different for each person, and it's very difficult to even get access to that state since cutting the brain open to get to it destroys a lot of it. But none of that suggests that brains don't run on regular physics. It just means you aren't smart enough to get your head around
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You're suggesting that human brains are somehow non-physical? That's... extremely unlikely.
As are the things it can to. In fact, there are rather strong indications at this time that some human brains can do things that may not be possible in this universe. Hence "unlikely" is not a show-stopper here. Incidentally, you have no basis for that probability assessment. Physics cannot even model plain life today, so we only know that quite a few things must be missing and at this time, because they are not described by Physics, they are extra-physical. Of course, I do not mean "out of existence", I me
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No, there are no indications that brains are doing things that aren't possible in our universe. The fact that they exist in our universe is extreme evidence to the contrary. If you want to claim the opposite then you're going to need more than "I don't understand how they work". Every indication is that they're just a regular neural network, connected with so many links and weightings that they're very difficult to analyse, but using regular physics (chemistry, even) for the connections. We've been implemen
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What we do know these days is that "emergent phenomenon" is just another word for "bullshit" or "wishful thinking". In Physics, the whole is not and cannot be more than the sum of its parts and interactions. The same is true, by extension, in computing. When people claim that machines will get intelligence or even consciousness if they are made just complex enough, then that is techno-mysticism (and to some degree Cargo Cult) but not science. That is not to say this is impossible, but if it is possible, t
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Government vs Private Sector (Score:3)
The tech giants -- Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. -- did not depend on an infusion of cash from governments to become leaders. Although there are likely exceptions, governments tend to do poorly when picking winners and losers. My guess is that China's major gains in A.I. will occur from spycraft, in other words, stealing the intellectual property from companies in the West.
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That's half true. Until ten years ago, very few companies spent much money on AI. For 50 years it was mostly just the domain of government funded academics. Without all those decades of government support, it wouldn't have reached the point where companies started finding it useful and investing in it themselves.
On the other hand, the government wasn't really "picking winners and losers." No one knew which one AI would turn out to be. It was interesting and promising enough to justify continued investm
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Who paid for the first 13 years of school? Where did did A.I. PhDs get their student loans? And what of the many land-grant universities? Very little of the foundation was funded by these tech companies, it was the US tax payer that put up the cold hard cash to get these people through school.
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Well theoretically we(US) are operating a form of democracy, so the people have decided to make military and defense a public matter and not a private one. Although we do hire a lot of private contractors, at the high level that is determined by a government employee and funding is determined by an elected representative. Of course individually we have very little influence over the minutia of our government's operations, we have even less control over a corporation (unless we happen to be a shareholder). W
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Governments tend to do well when investing in new industries. Look at the investment in "green" tech by the US government. Okay, that solar company failed, but overall it's turned a nice profit for the government and given you Tesla and Solar City among others.
China invests heavily in basic research, which is the area that private investors won't touch because it's too risky. China's universities are now power houses of research. Keep thinking it's all stolen from the West if you like, it will only make the
Went (Score:5, Funny)
Well, how good are their AIs at Go?
Big plans zero results. (Score:1)
They are out hyping AI which certainly takes a lot to do compared to the US.
This democracy is *deep* in debt... (Score:2)
and voters -- including those who influence them -- want government money spent on bread, not education.
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The government of the US want Guns before Butter. Check the budget.
Education, an afterthought at this point given the military budget. One would think it's WW3.
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*You* need to check the budget, and see how social programs *dwarf* the Defense Dept budget. Even by completely wiping the DOD budget to zero, the US government would still run a steep deficit.
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True, but check the debt with regards to social programs and misspending (a lot going to the military).
Oh, and wars are mostly off budget, discretionary. We don't have as much right now as in the past, but it's still there.
prolly (Score:1)
Invisible due to international press... (Score:3)
China is already outdoing the US in a whole bunch of things, but international press do not cover this so lots of people don't really know what's going on there.
This is an understandable, often overlooked problem that not many people stop to think about.
The way press works for international coverage, for several countries, is to only publish a limited range of stories that overcomes the cultural/language barrier, when not ultimately going only for eye grabbing content.
And that's fine, because really, who's got the time and attention to know everything that's happening all around the world?
It's just naive and kinda dangerous to build an image of a country and it's industry based on the very limited information you get from main channels.
It's why even nowadays we still have so many people with this image that products coming from China are all shoddily made or clones of american/european products, when in fact not only China controls the vast majority of production for most electronics we use in a daily basis, several design decisions and technology advances also happen there.
It's nothing magical really... when you have a single country taking care of a huge percentage of worldwide production and manufacturing of tech related products for over a decade, of course they'll start developing their own products from start to finish. Think about what your own country would do in a similar situation.
People who have been paying attention for one reason or another to chinese branded smartphones, tablets, laptops and several other lines of products will know that they are fast becoming indistinguishable from high end lines of american and european brands. And particularly for their own market, there is no culural barrier to overcome. Technologies that are highly related to culture like AI (because recent advancements have been going around speech recognition and such) are bound to evolve in a different way.
Who's the leader in end-consumer quadcopters right now? DJI, indisputably, right? You know what DJI stands for? Dà-Jing Innovations Science and Technology Co. It's a Shenzhen based and born company. There's a whole bunch of tech crammed in those drones that were developed by the company... tech for obstacle avoidance, 3d tech for hand gesture recognition, radars and sensors.
Some people might not know, but Lenovo is also a chinese company. Yes, the one that now owns the staple of business laptops, the Thinkpad line. The same company that owns Motorola.
There's a whole bunch of cases like those in the tech industry.
Not to mention how chinese companies have been buying left and right a whole bunch of hotel businesses, movie studios and other companies people have no idea about:
http://fortune.com/2016/03/18/... [fortune.com]
Sure, a whole bunch of tech that several chinese companies made in the past were straight rip offs of designs from US, europeran and japanese based companies, but this has changed in later years. And the further you go into several tech devices, the more you understand how much of the technology behind them are really not coming from a single US brand.
High end technology for all sorts of displays nowadays have a majority made in South Korea (LG and Samsung). Central parts of cameras of all shapes and sizes, including smartphone cameras, mostly comes from Sony, a japanese company. Samsung also dominates when it comes to technology related to storage (memory chips and whatnot), but that market is a bit more balanced. CPUs, GPUs and SOCs are still mostly developed by american and british companies (Qualcomm, Intel nVidia), but that doesn't mean they don't have chinese or asian competition (Samsung, Mediatek, Allwinner). More importantly though is that in several areas of technology, if a chinese company isn't already there among the top businesses involved, there's likely to be one encroaching.
So yeah, I don't know if chinese companie
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In fact Lenovo was designing and building Thinkpads back when they had an IBM badge on them. IBM specified what they wanted, Lenovo built it for them. A pretty common set-up for western companies.
Do people think that Apple does 100% of the design work on the iPhone in California? Of course not.
Don't forget Huawei either. They are huge in telecomms and networking, and one of the pioneers of 5G tech.
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I doubt it. Because thats a very narrow view of how press releases works. Except for bullet point 4, which is generally a dishonest rebrand of "media" into "tabloid media".
Because if the first point was true, we wouldn't even have any press releases from them. We have lots. Main obstacle is that nobody wants to setup China export shops, in a age where media use major companies such as Reuters for news sources. Another issue is that due Hong Kong existing, as well as Taiwan, any Chinese news export won't set
Oops (Score:2)
Re:No - Much ado about nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
How much money is Google putting into AI research? Amazon? Apple? IBM? Others? How successful are they compared to the Chinese government's efforts?
How many products or services do people use which rely on U.S. company's AI efforts and how many which rely on Chinese created efforts?
The idea that the only comparison is between Chinese government funding and U.S. government funding is ridiculous. The private companies in the U.S. working on AI are the ones actually accomplishing things nowadays and announcing another government 5-year plan for China to win some sort of AI race isn't going to change that.
Re: No - Much ado about nothing (Score:2)
Yes but Chinese companies like Baidu, TenCent and Alibaba are comparable to Google, Facebook, and Amazon and are very competitive in AI research and accomplishments. China's home grown supercomputers are the fastest in the world and the Chinese are pursuing multiple avenues of development and improvement in software and hardware. Assuming that the US will continue leading in computer hardware and software without a national push to improve is naive.
Re: No - Much ado about nothing (Score:1)
Let China win. Let them innovate and develop all the hot new technology. Then copy it from them without a care in the world. China's been doing that for decades and it's worked out pretty well for them.
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Let China win. Let them innovate and develop all the hot new technology. Then copy it from them without a care in the world. China's been doing that for decades and it's worked out pretty well for them.
This is an emotional statement meant to be use as, I don't know, sarcasm maybe. Pure chest thumping that achieves nothing.
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It is true though. It also worked well for Japan. And, hell, it is how the US got started, by stealing patented device ideas from the British/UK. The thing is, they start out copying and then springboard that knowledge into innovation. Anyone with any amount of experience knows that engineers learn a lot from the manufacturing lines and processes. We've sent a tremendous amount of ours to The Middle Kingdom, what is that doing to the development of our engineering talent? Even when dealing with AI: in
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"This is one of the major reason such companies provide such services 'in the cloud'"
You say this as if it prevents corporate secrets from leaking out. Employees come and go, and many take ideas with them. You see it all the time, and this is no different.
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And before that it was the Koreans, and the Japanese.
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Yes but Chinese companies like Baidu, TenCent and Alibaba are comparable to Google, Facebook, and Amazon
Baidu's main AI lab is in California.
Most of the researchers there are Americans.
Baidu Silicon Valley AI Lab [baidu.com]
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China isn't spending money on stuff like this because they're too stupid to realize that the American private sector will deliver the technology if they just wait. They have their reasons.
The companies that you are calling "US Companies" have no real allegiance to the US. If all things were equal, they could just as well do the research in, say, Indonesia, which has almost the population of the US, or India, which is considerably larger. But neither of those have the America's massive research infrastruc
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Indonesia? No. Yeah, they have population, but no infrastructure, little education, and they have their own problems as one of the largest Muslim populations in the world. https://www.wsj.com/articles/t... [wsj.com]
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Indonesia? No. Yeah, they have population, but no infrastructure, little education,
Which is exactly my point.
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Where ai/deep learning research is published (Score:1)
The publication evidence is that the major centers of research on deep learning are Redmond, Cambridge and universities in China -
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse... [linkedin.com]
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But we have Watson!! (Score:2)
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What governments invest in and what private businesses invest in are usually two different categories of research - as far as I know, that is the way it has always been. Private companies typically invest in monetising research results, or do research on things that can be made into a saleable product - that is after all the primary purpose of most businesses. But where does that research come from? Normally from government funded sources - certainly this is the case outside the US, where most universities
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How much money is Google putting into AI research? Amazon? Apple? IBM? Others? How successful are they compared to the Chinese government's efforts?
How many products or services do people use which rely on U.S. company's AI efforts and how many which rely on Chinese created efforts?
The idea that the only comparison is between Chinese government funding and U.S. government funding is ridiculous. The private companies in the U.S. working on AI are the ones actually accomplishing things nowadays and announcing another government 5-year plan for China to win some sort of AI race isn't going to change that.
With all governments, there is usually an arrangement to create a government need and hence to fund research. Its been this way for the past 75 years.
But foreign countries take the view that 3% or 4% of gdp is for funding innovation. Innovation is the key to progress.
The USA under your POTUS had redirected that 3-4% towards a tax reduction for the wealthiest. When that healthcare and research money goes to drop corporate tax rates by 15 %, you will see some humongous transfers of wealth from parents to
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In my American pre-K, we used to make collages out of macaroni. I could outdo anyone in the class in terms of what needed to be done, except for the Chinese kids and their superior AI.
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You should see what they're doing to with chopsticks.
FTFY
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The problem with the USA is that it now eats too much of its own dog food.
https://www.theguardian.com/ne... [theguardian.com]
The USA is 14th for Reading
The USA is 25th for Maths
The USA is 17th for Science.
And the US fares little better for Health, welfare, life expectancy, democracy, corruption, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, equality, social mobility, etc etc etc etc.
You are number 1 for Prisoners (per 100,000)
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The problem with the USA is that it now eats too much of its own dog food.
Societal pressure to have students do well in tests in small monolithic cultures, like South Korea and Finland, do not necessarily translate perfectly into larger societies. The American educational system is actually praised across much of Asia, because it focuses more on creativity rather than regurgitation. Slower students do tend to find it easier to drop out of US schools, but as compensation, the best students usually find unique opportunities that allow them to excel in ways that Asian countries don'
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Such as ?
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"There is just too much you cannot do."
Such as ?
Broadcast the AlphaGo vs Chinese grandmaster Go match in China?
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Yeah, I'm sure that set back their progress thousands of years. Hell, it probably added 6 billion hours of productivity to the country as a whole.
Hey! Maybe we should do that with sports, and cat videos, and pron, and celebrity watching. I bet productivity would skyrocket!
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"China is never going to have the world's biggest economy until it ditches its totalitarian system."
You had me nodding along until that last part. While their numbers are a bit sketchy it seems to he generally agreed upon that China's economy is growing faster than ours and has been for quite some time. Couple that with the fact that they have over 3 times the consumers that we do and I think it's really quite possible for them to have a larger economy in the future.
Now if we're talking per capita gdp that
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USA population is 321 Million.
China has about 4 times the US population.
China also has faster, easier access to all of Asia which accounts for about 60% of the worlds population (USA is 4%)
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I'm betting on them instituting polygamy with two or more husbands for every female. Or making male homosexuality acceptable and even preferable. Maybe castration as a way to receive free college education (it reduces the needfulness)? Another thing is that maybe they'll all take to avidly watching pron and never even notice that they've never actually hung out with real women nor do they care to.
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Ah, I didn't realize they were so much over a billion. Thanks for the update.
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That's one example. I can't speak for the rest but I truly wonder if you are comparing apples to apples.
For instance, as regards violence, most US counties are as safe as the safest in Europe. Something like 2 percent of the US counties have 1/3 of the violence.
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You didn't notice the "never reporting anything" statement? That makes it an air-tight unassailable claim, like The Bible.
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Being American does not automatically mean you win, it requires far more than that.
I think the US population does not have what it takes to understand that. They have been told for too long that they are massively ahead of anybody else, even in things were they are already massively behind. Now they stick to that in order to feel good and think their way is the only good one (i.e. no potential for learning from others).
Of course, that is how empires fall: Believing themselves to be ahead instead of actually being ahead.
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
The USA was lucky, not great.
Name any other large, well populated, educated, industrialised nation with large amounts of natural resources that was not bombed during WWII. During the 1940-1970s the USA was able to build on what they already had, the rest of the world was effectively rebuilding roads, rail. schools, hospitals, and all the other infrastructure required. More to the point, they were able to build and sell the things the rest of the world needed.
During the 1950s the USA account for over 50% of the entire worlds GDP, today its about 20%.
The world is no longer reliant on the US, sure it impacts all the world, but so does China and the EU.
The US is 4% of the worlds population, so 96% of the worlds population and 80% of world trade are not US based.
China can (and will) surpass the USA, so will India and Brazil, may not happen in my life time, but it will happen, and I am not so sure the US is capable to accepting that cultural shock. I think high up in some sectors of the US government they understand this which is why they are meddling in the politics of Asian countries, they don't want as Asian Trading Bloc because that is 60% of the worlds population, and the area of greatest economic growth potential. Growth potential in the USA is almost nil, its a saturated market.
And while Trump et al keeps shouting USA USA USA and USA first, the rest of the world keeps on improving, and putting the USA further and further down the ladder. For example, the world is not longer reliant on Boeing, there is Airbus, and China is getting into the act too. ARM is doing well, Its British not US. Samsung is doing well, again not US. And there are thousands of examples where non-US products are better than US ones.
Its not like the US has failed, it more like the rest of the world has grown up and is no longer dependant. And because of that, the natural progression is that the US will fall behind in many fields
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China can (and will) surpass the USA, so will India and Brazil, may not happen in my life time,
China and India will, but not Brazil. The US has a larger population than Brazil, and that gap will increase (the fertility rates are the same, and more people want to immigrate to the US). The social and economic gaps between the US and Brazil will narrow, but probably not close entirely.
The US may only be 4% of the world's population, but that still makes it the third most populated country after China and India.
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The US may only be 4% of the world's population, but that still makes it the third most populated country after China and India.
The US is a collection of states... So you should really include the other big collection of states in your comparison, the EU. The population of the EU is greater than the US by a considerable margin.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll do that once the EU countries give up their separate UN votes :)
ARM is owned by a JP corp (Score:2)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The point being that all IP, knowledge, future plans is not decided by UK people or "europe" (whatever that is)
Selling ARM to Japanese is a "stupid decision" by UK gov. (They could have blocked due to some "national interest")
I would argue that both US and Europe are losing out to the whole BRICS block
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Excellent point. The US has grown fat and lazy while it was ahead and that now makes it difficult for them to even only keep pace with the others.
I do know a European example that was not bombed in WWII: Switzerland. The difference is that they used that advantage and are today in 2nd place as to GDP per capita in Europe, after Luxembourg (apparently suffered very little infrastructure-damage in WWII as well and would be a second example) and with about twice the value of Germany, the UK or France. Not havi
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Much of the current problem started with WWII. The USA was lucky, not great. Name any other large, well populated, educated, industrialised nation with large amounts of natural resources that was not bombed during WWII. During the 1940-1970s the USA was able to build on what they already had, the rest of the world was effectively rebuilding roads, rail. schools, hospitals, and all the other infrastructure required. More to the point, they were able to build and sell the things the rest of the world needed. During the 1950s the USA account for over 50% of the entire worlds GDP, today its about 20%. The world is no longer reliant on the US, sure it impacts all the world, but so does China and the EU. The US is 4% of the worlds population, so 96% of the worlds population and 80% of world trade are not US based. China can (and will) surpass the USA, so will India and Brazil, may not happen in my life time, but it will happen, and I am not so sure the US is capable to accepting that cultural shock. I think high up in some sectors of the US government they understand this which is why they are meddling in the politics of Asian countries, they don't want as Asian Trading Bloc because that is 60% of the worlds population, and the area of greatest economic growth potential. Growth potential in the USA is almost nil, its a saturated market. And while Trump et al keeps shouting USA USA USA and USA first, the rest of the world keeps on improving, and putting the USA further and further down the ladder. For example, the world is not longer reliant on Boeing, there is Airbus, and China is getting into the act too. ARM is doing well, Its British not US. Samsung is doing well, again not US. And there are thousands of examples where non-US products are better than US ones.
This. That 80% of the world trade happens *outside* of the US or that countries can actually survive without it, that will be a tough, bitter pill to swallow to many who bought the "bring jobs back" kool-aid. He who was stupid enough to believe it will get his Darwin reward in time.
Its not like the US has failed, it more like the rest of the world has grown up and is no longer dependant. And because of that, the natural progression is that the US will fall behind in many fields .
Exactly. Countries are simply climbing themselves up. Economies are not a zero-sum game (unless we still do nothing about the millions of effectively illiterate workers who are simply unemployable outside of grunt work.)
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An advantage has to be used well to count. The US is not 2nd world yet (like Argentina), but it seems to be on the way there by slowly falling behind. Of course, it would be to anybodies benefit if that could be fixed, because the things done now (protectionism, sabotage of competition) basically only do harm. But I do not see it happen anytime soon. It will be interesting to see at what time the US economy bottoms out and start to catch up again. There are some huge challenges to overcome for that and Trum
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Protectionism and sabotage of competition are key components needed to develop a local economy. The US did to great success, it was only when the free trade corporatist baboons took the helm that the US started (and hasn't stopped) falling behind. Now China is doing it and, predictably, it is working gangbusters for them.
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Canada, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, Australia, and others I'm probably forgetting. The USA was bombed in World War 2 btw. Pearl harbor? German sabotage efforts?
I'm from Latin America, and to put Mexico (and Spain) in that list is ludicrous. Spain pretty much turned itself into a backwater land, and Mexico, though far more industrialized than most other LATAM country (sans Argentina), it truly did not belong (and still doesn't) to a list of industrialized, educated countries. And I don't mean this as an act of derision (I love Mexico, I just care enough for it to point where it is lagging.)
Canada and Switzerland, though educated and industrialized, were not signi
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Australia was bombed [wikipedia.org] in WW2, just for the record.
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The USA is 14th for Reading
The USA is 25th for Maths
If you look at the data, the difference comes down to demographics, urban vs rural and race.
The top scorers in PISA are highly urbanised and racially homogeneous.
If you look at data from American Whites and Asians in the cities, they compare very well.
There is less data for blacks and rural populations, but I think those demographics in America would also compare favourably to their fellows in other OECD countries.
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This speaks more to long-standing racial inequalities in the treatment of minorities than anything else, such as the racial ability you are trying to imply. When your family gets put in jail over "crimes" created to punish minorities such as marijuana usage (knocks down blacks and browns), crack cocaine usage (again, blacks and browns but mostly blacks). When your way-back inheritance consists of not-a-fucking-thing while some dead-stupid fuck gets to inherit the family negroes and some land, hmm someone
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Wow! Where did that rant come from?
I don't know anything about the ghettos. I'm not even American. Am just talking about the facts behind the PISA rankings, and why US scores lower than other advanced economies. I was not trying to imply anything about nature vs nurture here, because it is irrelevant to the context.
Try considering a less emotional topic - the urban vs rural gap. There are a number of hypotheses, but we still don't really know the root causes of that.
But if it makes you feel better, I to
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I saw your comment and some earlier similar ones. Maybe not from you but definitely Americans who use these statistics use them to drive home the (incorrect) point that "the minorities" are dragging down the nation due to their lower innate intelligence. I lumped you in with them. I think I was already pissed about seeing this shit earlier and didn't read too carefully. I should go back and respond on the other thread I read.
I sort of apologize but I still don't get the point you were trying to make. Y
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He went, but he didn't stick with it. Just wasn't cut out for it, I guess.
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While I agree with you, I'd like to point out that the media has not outsmarted Trump yet.
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You've not met too many journalists. Some of them are really big on showing off their assumed intellectual pedigree. It's the sort of snotty attitude that is part of the culture within some academic realms. (Engineering student here, so I don't share much with journalist culture. We engineers favor bluntness to the point of rudeness)
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The English (and American) language struggles to capture the catastrophe that is the tRumpF administration.
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And you know why the US government "put money into the pockets of the rich"? Yes, that right: because of idiots like you.
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China races to the technological singularity while the US races to the end-state of capitalism.