This relationship between the government, national security establishment and community, and the tech industry has already existed for decades from the founding of Silicon Valley with Fairchild Semiconductor to many others afterwards ranging from Oracle (a CIA funded project), RSA to Palantir.
But there are no cases of a successful tech industry without government support. So we can safely say government support is key. Perhaps government support is necessary but not sufficient.
Interesting to see the US somewhat following China's lead here. Industry/government/defense cooperation has a rich (and somewhat ugly) history in the US, but seems to have fallen out of favor in recent decades, whereas China has leaned in even harder toward five-year plans that attempt to get every part of society -- academia, government, business, media, etc. marching in the same direction.
I've really started to wonder about how, and how much, government should try to influence a lot of this. In the 60s Kennedy said we're going to put a man on the moon (US) and we did it. There's clearly some role for direction-setting at the national level.
But it's not without costs: corruption, cronyism, wasted money. China's been trying to bootstrap a domestic semiconductor industry for decades and the most they have to show for it is SMIC, which is nowhere near TSMC or even Intel's level of capability. Ditto for internal-combustion cars--they (rightfully) trumpet EVs as a pretty large success story but leave out the part about wasting billions trying to make a domestic Detroit. And then there's the fact that government has a hard time writing sub-$1bln checks so there's the potential for a huge amount of waste if things don't pan out.
Just don't minimize their achievements because the next thing you know they'll be buying off US and European companies. BYD went from a company everybody in the auto industry laughed at to a partner in Daimler and Toyota joint ventures and a company Warren Buffet's org has invested in more money than they have in GM.
> BYD went from a company everybody in the auto industry laughed at to a partner in Daimler and Toyota joint ventures and a company Warren Buffet's org has invested in more money than they have in GM.
How much of that is due to China's protectionism, huge untapped market and forced local partnerships vs what the company's tech is actually worth?
US is _returning_ to industrial policies which PRC civil military fusion was originally modelled off. IMO establishing complex indigenous industries require the appetite for massive risk / waste which is always preferable to the alternative of not building the capabilities in first place. PRC semi efforts has been pretty lackluster until last few years, i.e. integrated circuits only got promoted to first-level discipline with streamlined funding last year. There are worst things to waste money on in this security climate.
Also, WWII accelerated many discoveries in several areas of mathematics (in America, at least): statistics, optimization, control, numerical analysis. To such an extent, that many of those discoveries are still the main object of study in their respective areas and are being extended to more general versions.
So general red scare fear mongering being used to spend more public money on private enterprise, making future tech companies indebted to NATO. It even includes a loyalty test to get the initial funding.
I don't know if it's a positive or a negative, but China has been focused in a very organized way on this subject for quite some time now - in a manner that other nations are just starting to do. China has also been able to, coordinately, use it's massive population as a R&D bed for training and the like.
The descriptions of the biometric technology I've heard that is deployed in Xinjiang truly sounds like a science fiction. Voice/facial/gait/etc all deployed at huge scale in production, with gigantic datasets collected under questionable conditions. I don't have any links but there are some good NPR podcasts about the subject.
Looking at CVPR this year, China has the most number of authors [0]. Significant portion of the US and EU authors are probably Chinese students as well. I think they are doing quite well atleast in the front of training researchers.
They're out publishing[1] and out spending everyone else[2], I asked Jack Clack from OpenAI that question a few years ago and he said he didn't really know exactly how far ahead they are, just that more people and more money is being applied in a more organized fashion.
When people bring up scientific advances in China, I am always skeptical.
What percent of Chinese publishing is not fraudulent?
Look at the scale of Fraud across China,
including in Academia:
"The online publication Quartz reported in 2017 that more than 50 percent of all articles retracted by scientific journals worldwide for fake peer reviews were submitted by Chinese authors. ... 55% - The percentage of articles submitted by Chinese authors that were retracted by scientific journals worldwide for fake peer reviews"
"It usually involves authors posing as their own peer reviewers and submitting made-up contact information for the supposed reviewer – a scam that publishers exposed by tracking the email addresses of author and reviewer to the same IP address. This type of fraud is on the rise and more often than not involves Chinese authors.
"In 2015, for instance, Britain-based publisher BioMed Central retracted 43 articles, including 41 from China.
"Later in the same year, Germany’s Springer retracted 64 papers, nearly all from Chinese scholars,
"while the Dutch publishing company Elsevier retracted nine medical science articles written by Chinese researchers.
"In what is said to be the largest single-incident retraction of journal publications in history, Springer Nature in 2017 retracted 107 articles in Tumor Biology published between 2012 and 2016, all of them authored by Chinese scholars from universities in Shanghai." [1]
Note, that doesn't say that 55% of submissions from Chinese authors were retracted. It says that 55% of retractions were from Chinese authors. If 60% of all submissions were from Chinese authors, then actual rate of retraction would be less than average. If say 40% of submissions were from Chinese authors, then the rate of retraction would be just slightly higher.
Just open your eyes and look at reality. TikTok, HarmonyOS, a rapidly advancing space program, and Shenzhen's 100% 5G coverage, and so on, did not come out of Silicon Valley. The writing is on the wall.
They went from making ball point pens in the 1980s to flying a rover Mars in 2021. So what if HarmonyOS is just rebranded Android? They modified it for their own designs, put in a few backdoors and it will achieve its purpose, capitalizing on the work of Westeners. They are standing on the shoulders of giants.
HarmonyOS is absolutely not just rebranded Android. That is total nonsense, and that Ars article is ridiculously bereft of any understanding of HarmonyOS.
HarmonyOS supports multiple kernels including Android/Linux
I open my eyes to data and objective, independent sources, where possible.
And I think the aforementioned findings of fraud in academia have analogs across industries in China-- construction (typically the industry with highest most corrupt activities regardless of nation), food manufacturing, accounting & finance, etc.
Here's an objective, independent source. I am a foreigner in China. Increasingly, robotics designed at my company are designed against Chinese chips because they are cheaper, more available, and therefore present less design risk. Meanwhile, a friend of mine in semiconductor trading just booked about a dozen life fortunes in a single month capitalising on the pain and suffering of conventional electronics producers with foreign BOMs.
This is a pitiful sum. We're talking over 15 years for the strongest alliance in the world. Just $1B? What is this a school for ants?
We're talking 1/12th of an aircraft carrier. For all of Nato?
How much was put into the Manhattan project by just three (!!!) countries, one of them Canada. What, like 30x this in inflation adjusted dollars? That doesn't even count the rest of the spending on nuclear weapons over the years.
Arguably this is simply the wrong strategy for investment. Look at the US “Endless Frontiers Act” for an analog, 95% of funding for cronies and pork. Fear and tech-hype driven. This is not the “deterministic optimism” that achieves goals.
I agree with eliminating shark fin soup, it is a cruel and destructive harvesting practice. But it absolutely should not have been a part of a bill on funding tech innovation. Argh.
This is just for an accelerator program, do you seriously think that a startup that develops something meaningful from this seed captial will not get the full force of NATO's budget shoved into it?
But this is partially my point. We didn't nickel and dime all the crazy geniuses that put together the manhattan project in 200 different startups over 15 years. War AI isn't something you can bootstrap. You need serious resources and talent, and most of the people that are great are getting offered half a million a year unless they work for a startup with equity.
This is not enough money and this timeline is ridiculously long.
If I was already well-paid, I probably wouldn't leave a job just because of the investment money but if I already wanted to start my own business and could do with the extra dollars for R&D, it would definitely be worth looking at.
Assuming of course, you don't have any qualms about your tech being used to kill people at a later date :-/
This isn't the total sum being spent by all of those countries, just the money they're spending on it together via NATO. There's still DARPA and similar agencies in other member countries who would be funding similar research.
Yeah I know all about In-Q-Tel and DARPA. I have a friend who was funded by In-Q-Tel a decade ago or so.
The thing that I'm trying to express, the thing that policy makers can't quite get their heads around, is that war AI is different. It's not a little startup-y thing you can cobble together until it sorta, kinda works for a specific use-case. We already have that. Missiles, aircraft, nuclear weapons simulations all have specialized AI. But that isn't the future. The future is something like Alpha Zero being applied to a whole domain or a whole battlefield. Something that coordinates and controls all the ships, planes, missiles, drones, and sensors in an arena for as total domination as can be achieved. We've had AI that augments human ability for decades. And it is effective, no question.
But that isn't what is going to define the next generation of warfare.
China will become the most powerful nation eventually if they do not accidentally prevent themselves from doing so. An attempt to stay ahead of China is likely a losing battle so get over this rivalry and focus on cooperation.
What would China stop from becoming freer if this becomes the limiting factor? Assuming country X has figured out the best way to run a country for whatever you mean with best, at least in principle nothing stops China from doing the same thing. And it is still simply larger. Unsurmountable scaling issues? Does not sound likely to me. Large cultural change required? Maybe hard to do over years or a few decades but again I see not why you would not eventually go through a beneficial cultural change over generations.
But this is also why I added the qualification of China not standing in its own way, they have certainly the power to cause their own downfall, cause a [civil] war for example. But even then, unless the country gets fractured into many small countries, what would prevent them raising from the ruins stronger?
In addition to the aging population problem mentioned in the article, a huge economic bubble based on domestic real estate investment funded by poorly secured loans has burst, the effects of which are only beginning to be felt. All across the country skyscrapers stand half built, monuments to better days. Simultaneously, Western supply chains are either actively or passively (due to shipping issues associated with COVID) seeking diversification, and Chinese labour is now considered too expensive for a large swathe of manufacturing. Traditional industries such as textiles, shoes and so forth are all moving out to Vietnam/Bangladesh/Myanmar/etc. The accelerating affects of automation further compound this scenario. Further, the local education system and HR market are undeveloped for higher level skills, and core aspects of the domestic business environment create substantial inefficiency (financial regulation and practice, commercial law enforcement, etc.).
That said, I still find China to have many benefits as a business environment, and I will never work for military of any country on principle.
China ascend to Power is hardly fiat accompli, and on top of it their food insecurity and disputes with 17 neighbors is only going to compel them to focus inward.
Yes, all those Africa and BRI adventures are already turning bitter for host nations.
US and USSR won the WW2 - you get power by winning wars and winning decisively. If China wrests Taiwan, we can then seriously talk about their contention until then its just talk.
China went from a colonial backwater to the #1 real economy in the world, without endless foreign wars. Recent history irrefutably disproves your "might is right" framework.
There is a reason why USD is the world reserve currency. How much trade is done using your '#1 real economy currency'.
Export-Oriented economies have a lot of problems and that will be evident as the Global growth is coming to stagnation this decade.
Power is power - that is why every country maintains a military, even the small ones. The recent history is 'stabler' than past because of Bretonwoods and various maritime security guarantees. That did not happen in vacuum and China is not the architect of the system.
China was only a colonial backwater during the time centered around the "century of humiliation." It was an unchallenged sprawling empire for millennia. This is just reversion to the mean.
It is fundamentally an issue of separatism, and associated violent extremism/terrorism. The idea that it is some kind of "race war" is a pure fantasy of race realist Westerners.
At least with the US in the lead you can freely criticize the US on the Internet, or even in person, without being censored, disappeared, jailed, and/or "re-educated".
Try criticizing the CCP on a Chinese message board, or in person, and see what happens. Is that really the world you want to live in?
The infractions necessary for being "disappeared" or re-educated are different in the US, yes. Yet I could very easily say things on this very site that would lead me straight to prison in my own country, and I owe it directly to US cultural influence because my country does not have those issues for which I'd go to prison. Is that really better? TBH I'm not sure. What's sure is that red is dead, but imperialism is alive and kicking.
And yet, the US never went to any length of stopping the head of state being compared to Winnie the Poo.
In fact, the mere fact that the US fuckery is so well documented is quite telling. Remember “tank man” not returning any results on Bing just a few weeks back?
I think the better way to view it amongst policymakers on both sides are: do you make your policy decisions to create an antagonistic relationship like US vs. USSR? Or a cooperative one like US-UK or US-Japan? For whatever reasons (and tbh a lot of it is perhaps a massive CCP inferiority complex and short sightedness, vs. US short sightedness), current policymakers have chosen to undergo an antagonistic side.
But one can argue the US-China relationship initiated between Nixon/Deng was one of the most mutually beneficial relationships, economically speaking, over the past 3-4 decades, far outpacing US-UK...until the Xi-faction and the Trumpers killed it off...
Defeatist. As if there is a game to be won. Do you really believe that humanity will stay divided into states with vastly different lifestyles forever? And even if you believe this, do you have any reason to believe that the most powerful country would be any other than the largest [1] one?
[1] Largest here does not imply area, I am more thinking of a combination of factors including area and natural resources which are not affected by technological progress.
China's idea of cooperation is the Chinese-Pakistani relationship in which the PM of Pakistan won't even speak up about human rights of Uighurs. As per Document No. 9, the existence of free liberal societies is an existential threat to the CCP and they will act to export their totalitarianism to extinguish them. The only way you give up rivalry with a revisionist expansionist ethnostate is by surrendering. No thanks.
As per Document No. 9, the existence of free liberal societies is an existential threat to the CCP and they will act to export their totalitarianism to extinguish them.
I was not aware of this document and just read the Wikipedia article and skimmed a translation. Yes, it describes the promotion of a number of western values as threats but I can not find where it says anything about extinguishing them, only how to limit their influence in the country itself, for example by blocking certain content in China.
Imran Khan won't "speak up" about Xinjiang's separatism issues just like he won't "speak up" about the "Great Replacement" or other ideological nonsense that has literally nothing to do with the sovereign nation of Pakistan.
Except he speaks up about Islamophobia in the west all the time. His inability to speak to the genocide right across his border is not ideological nonsense, and calling it merely an issue of separatism is white washing.
Not until 2023 at the earliest. Seems like a deathrattle for the increasingly irrelevant military cult. Systemic R&D deficits like this take decades to fully address.
When Russia invaded Crimea, there were still British red coats stationed in New York City. The Russian military has been there ever since.
Speaking of the British empire, only an upper middle class westerner can nod their head when they see the British, who oversaw a massacre of Chinese in Hong Kong in 1967, pontificating over China's obligations to the British empire vis a vis Hong Kong. They even have former commander in chief of British Forces Overseas Hong Kong Chris Patten on Sky News lecturing the Chinese. The reason the UK took hold of Hong Kong was they went to war with the Chinese in order to push heroin and opium on a Chinese population they were trying to turn into drug addicts.
* Russia did not invade Crimea, it joined Russia via popular referendum. Virtually no one died and there is no internal movement to rejoin Ukraine (who clearly cares about Crimean "citizens" because it cut off their water supply). That is not an "invasion". These are all easily verifiable facts.
* Hong Kong is part of China since it was decolonized. This is indisputable.
I'm curious, have you actually studied the historical context of Crimea and Hong Kong? Beyond just taking headlines from NATO-aligned tabloids as absolute fact?
A popular referendum that was held _after_ the Russian military, with their national insignia removed, occupied Crimea en masse, just to be clear. If Mexico invaded Southern California, and then held a referendum with suspiciously high levels of voter turnout and a nearly 90% yes vote, don’t you think people would find that suspicious? Can’t you imagine why Ukraine and its allies think this was an illegal conquest?
To make your analogy historically correct, it would have to be preceded by the United States having loaned San Diego to Mexico for decades of military use and the vast majority of San Diegans being ethnically "Mexican". Then notorious anti-Mexican racist Donald Trump is installed as the governor of California by NATO via coup d'etat.
Of course there is a difference of opinion. This is natural for any political issue.
The facts, however, are very clear cut in this particular situation. And you don't have to blindly believe conspiracy theories or NATO/Kremlin propaganda to get those facts.
I don’t believe I’ve ever advocated for that viewpoint. I’ve only been speaking about Crimea, and in that case, Russia is very clearly the aggressor. Yes, there are historical complexities, there is regional context. It is not cut and dry, black and white. At the end of the day, however, regardless of the ethnic makeup of Crimea, it was sovereign Ukrainian territory, seized in violation of international law and norms.
I don’t live in Eastern Europe, or anywhere near it. I have nuanced opinions about international affairs, and I’ll readily acknowledge that the United States and its NATO allies have done more than their share of bad in this world, including sponsoring multiple coup d’etats.
I just think that in this case, on balance, Ukraine is the aggrieved party.
Claiming that Russia is the unilateral aggressor in 2014 is a crystal clear exposition of the naive "Russia bad" worldview that selectively omits crucial details.
If Ukraine had any semblance of "sovereignty" post-USSR, it was totally crushed by NATO's 2014 coup. Recognizing the unpredictable hybrid aggression of NATO, Russia decisively reinforced its long-standing strategic position on Crimea and the Black Sea. It was fundamentally a defensive, pragmatic reaction forced by NATO's aggression.
You can see similar narratives regarding the recent military escalation in the region. Ukraine unilaterally declared an intent to militarily invade Crimea, and Russia mobilized forces on the border as a reaction. Yet the Western media totally ignored the virtual declaration of war by Ukraine and painted Russia once again as the sole aggressor. Fortunately, Russia was able to deescalate the situation.
Yes, Ukraine as a sovereign nation is the aggrieved party. But the aggressor is NATO!
I highly doubt this. Historically speaking the invasion dynamic is going the other way - FROM Europe INTO Russia. Russians are scared of the European invasion, not the other way around.
Yes and how did those invasions go? Russia is a fortress due to its size and weather.
But when Russia invaded Europe towards the end of WW2, they grabbed all of Poland, half of Germany, and more. They could have gone all the way until the English channel if they wanted, if the US wasn’t there.
Russia did not literally invade Europe. This is ridiculous revisionism. The Red Army singlehandedly defeated Hitler's eastward invading campaign and pushed it all the way to Berlin.
Soooo… the Russian army beat a European one and marched several hundred km’s into Europe, but it’s not an invasion?
Yes, the European nation attacked first, and the Russian response was 100% justified.
The point is that Russia struck back against one of the strongest armies in history, broke its back, and then counter-invaded. They only stopped when they ran into the Allies.
Without an expansionist- one could say evangelical- ideology like communism in power in Russia, why the heck would Russians care to push west? As any great power they want influence, yes, but it's odd to imagine that 20th century dynamics at their most tumultuous and bloody overshadow all of the previous centuries' default policies.
Because there are more factors beyond the long-standing ideological project to spread the doctrine of NATO (hiding behind terms like "democracy" and "human rights") around the world.
For instance, the US has an enormous mutual economic interest with PRC, and recognizing ROC's claim to virtually all of mainland China (the PRC) would be enormously complicate that crucial material relationship. ROC and PRC are mutually exclusive concepts because they claim the same territory, and PRC is the far more valuable economic partner.
The AI part is a bit akward to take in since i've read about the US buying Dwave systems gear in Canada because of the EU being ahead of the US regarding AI research. ( In Snowden or WL files ) ... But NATO almost is the US + EU.
What is the reasoning and how far is everyone really?
At this point the files you're referencing are 10 years old or so. I would imagine it's a completely different playing field. I would also note that the documents you're referencing (not sure of a specific document) as a whole only touch specific projects and teams and aren't 100% visibility into the Govt. Organizations they purport to be from.
There is even a public VC:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
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https://fcw.com/blogs/lectern/2014/09/cia-oracle-government-...
https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2018/09/how-government-h...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/12/nsa_spying_wh...
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Karkar Electronics and NATO telecommunications:
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?n=edw...