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by TaylorAlexander 1870 days ago
I kind of feel like China has already passed us. The US defines "innovation" as patents but in reality innovation is so much more than that. The US feels like its slowly grinding to a halt, and when I see how China is growing, I think we're already behind. I have been shopping for machine tools, and the stuff in China isn't just cheap knock offs anymore. It's good enough for them to use in country to build bullet trains and passenger jets. Of course they do import machinery from elsewhere too, but I just get the sense that they are moving very fast. If they'd passed us on daily innovation, we wouldn't exactly know it. Its hard to quantify.

By the way I blame patents for this. Patents are a legal blockade on third party innovation. But that's how progress is made! Everyone copies everyone. You see something and you make a better version. Patents gum up the works and drive things to a standstill. They don't have this problem in China. Some people think investment won't happen without IP restrictions, but I think it will, just differently. There's no more unicorns and whales, but there's a lot more fish.
2 comments
ngc248 1870 days ago
More like implementation inertia, most other countries have leapfrogged from their primitive systems directly to the latest and greatest, while in the US they are still making do with decades old technology.
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latch 1870 days ago
At best, being able to build things that are built elsewhere would indicate parity. Further, for passenger jets, the C919 is far from being 100% domestically built (e.g., the engine comes from an american/french venture).

I'm hopeful we'll see all countries converge onto a similar pace of innovation and progress. Large countries/regions (as a simple proxy for population and access to raw resources) will hopefully reach this parity sooner than later. At that point, I also hope that 1 country/ideology will never be able to pull far ahead of another - short of some fluke breakthrough that can be kept secret.

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TaylorAlexander 1870 days ago
Well to be clear, I am responding specifically to the phrase "makes me almost certain that the US will lose its stranglehold on innovation soon."

Imagine two nations. A wealthy nation that used to innovate but has completely stopped innovation. It could continue to make advanced things using existing infrastructure and people, but could not improve beyond its current state. (This is the extreme, for illustration).

Then imagine a larger poorer nation that is rapidly advancing. Even before the poorer nation has surpassed the other in technological capabilities, it would be producing more total innovation per year. Growing requires lots of innovation. Stagnating... not so much.

So I am suggesting that the rate of innovation could be slowing in the US, and the rate of innovation could be higher in China. Even if absolute output is more advanced in the US, which would be a different metric. But the rate of innovation is important for projecting where each nation will be in the future, and I do believe intellectual property restrictions slow the rate of innovation.

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