It is really weird that this could have been Japan in the 90s, but the rise of cheap labor in China put a stop to Japan's dominance and they somehow didn't get back into it when Chinese labor became more expensive.
Maybe its just bad luck that the tech in the 90s wasn't compelling enough while it is in the 2020s. But Japan was going through the same demographic shift in the 90s that China is going through today, they began to act but the world decided to do things in China instead...and then...its not really clear to me why Japan is not investing as aggressively now (unless they are broke, or the capability to do such investments is gone?).
Many in the US don't have the stomach to achieve what is required (which what's happening in China right now):
1. Slave labor 2. No labor unions 3. Working many more hours for less pay (many employees sleep where they work) 4. Not caring about intellectual property, including your own work that might get sucked up into AI models 5. No workplace regulations
This doesn't even include the fact that China has a massive surveillance network keeping everything in order.
We have 1/100 of this in the US and people already act like they are persecuted prisoners.
> Not caring about intellectual property, including your own work that might get sucked up into AI models
But this is particularly funny. Which American AI company has respected anyones IP when it comes to AI? Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave seeing OpenAI.
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/china-83...
yes companies like Samsung and Apple are listed. No, it's not the predominant industry sector.
I don't want to descend into whataboutery, but it's entirely legal to use prisoners for slave labour in the US, and is routinely discussed in US legal reddit and the like: It's normalised in the states which depend on this kind of labour to get some things like road construction/maintenance done. Historically it was field work as well. I am unsure if this continues.
You would not at this point say the VC funded AI push in the west had very much concern for IPR. This is why IPR holders are in court. And yes, courts do exist in China, even if you stand very little chance of a just outcome as a foreigner.
You're not wrong about the surveillance.
The torygraph should be ashamed of itself.
I've been around the Mazda plant in Hiroshima, and the man-machine work pattern there was interesting. Taking static site robotics and making it mobile is a pretty natural progression. Maybe has more complexities but also has less embedded capital in the ground, to construct the flow process around the static robot. So as a step along the path for automation, bizarre though I think it is, having autonomous robots might be short-term to a path of re-working the process to suit static, less expensive robots.
It's even worse than that. The article shows that the west, on a per capita basis, has nearly 300% the robots that china does. Germany by itself has 449 robots per 10k compared to china's 567 per 10k.
It's not the west that has to catch up to china, it's china that has to catch up to the west when it comes to automation. Like every china related article, the truth is actually the opposite of what "news" companies write.
I think you misunderstand the metrics. The listed numbers are already per capita, adding them together does not increase the per capita number for the aggregate.
The question is whether technology bends the curve. If renewables, robotics, and AI mature and are deeply integrated before that demographic crunch fully bites, the labor shortfall matters a lot less. Energy abundance plus automation could decouple growth from headcount. In that scenario, demographics aren’t destiny, and China could be among the first to operate on near-zero marginal energy and labor costs at scale.
