[bogomipz]

Not at all. A big thrust of the article is about falling behind in AI adoption. See the first 3 paragraphs below the heading "Innovation and Adoption." Specifically:

>"Although the United States and China are very different and the latter’s approach has its limits, China is moving faster at scaling robots in society, and its AI Plus Initiative emphasizes achieving widespread industry-specific adoption by 2027. The government wants AI to essentially become a part of the country’s infrastructure by 2030. China is also investing in AGI, but Beijing’s emphasis is clearly on quickly scaling, integrating, and applying current and near-term AI capabilities."

[AtlasBarfed]

China is facing a demographic cliff that is potentially catastrophic.

I remember Japan talking about replacing its similar demographic problems with robots.

Didn't happen. Now ai and robotics is apparently progressed... But I'm guessing this will be some grand vision in the CCP to save their country, while at the same time fulfill the CCPs great desire for a totally controlled and subservient workforce.

Much like the Cold war, there's a lot of scare that can be built into that. Which corporations can use to get a whole lot of sweet government and military money.

But almost everything that was held up as an existential threat to democracy in the USSR turned out to be overblown in the best case, an outright fraud or smokescreen frequently.

As we can see from the Ukraine invasion, corruption in the military and control structures follows these authoritarian regimes. China also has this problem.

China was functioning well under reduced Deng Xiaoping rulership, but Xi is a typical purge and control authoritarian, which implies bad things about China's long term economic health.

Between the authoritarianism, demographic cliff, and possibly a massive real estate/finance bomb, China will probably have to become expansionist.

But they have nuclear frenemies all on their borders: Japan (effectively), Russia, Pakistan, India. They can be blockaded from petroleum access with a single us carrier group, which will happen if they invade Taiwan and I don't think they can help themselves.

But what do I know.

[churchill]

>They can be blockaded from petroleum access with a single us carrier group, which will happen if they invade Taiwan and I don't think they can help themselves.

I doubt it. This is just an armchair general's cope that's so faulty that I don't know where to start attacking it from.

Since Clinton's 1990s show of force in the Taiwan straits, China has built up a formidable navy, esp. their submarine forces. Within the straits, their AA/AD web, SOSUS, etc. guarantees they have freedom of action. Moving further, they have a strong submarine component that can seriously threaten any blockading forces.

They're also the world's sixth largest oil producer, and Naval War College [0] estimates suggest that they can stretch their emergency reserves to 8 years if they enforce, say, 45% rationing.

That's before you factor in that you'd be blockading up to 60% of the world's seaborne cargo volume, both from China, Japan, South Korea, etc. Unprecedented in the whole of human history.

Then there's their formidable 5th-gen. air force that can dominate South Korea, Japan, etc. easily, nuclear weapons that guarantee they won't lose any territory, and the massive economic whiplash the entire West will face as a result.

India might hate China, but it wants a multipolar world and won't help the West cut them down to size. So, they won't assist with the blockade.

The rest of Southeast Asia's economies are deeply interconnected with China, and they don't want to stir up their wrath, so they might condemn them, but won't even wave a stick at them.

Give it up, man.

[0]: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

[AtlasBarfed]

It's called the Malacca Straits.

Did you ... Read that? It basically says that the blockade is military simple. The rest of it is political.

China lacks a deep water navy, they can't challenge a US blockade in the Indian ocean.

[churchill]

>China lacks a deep water navy

I just hope the Pentagon's policymakers and war planners are less myopic. if you stumble in a confrontation with this overconfidence, and still lose Taiwan to China, Pax Americana is effectively over. The humiliation will be impossible to recover from.

[MaxPock]

Where are you from and what's the TFR there ?

[AtlasBarfed]

The US has immigration to "compensate" for post industrial birthrates. Something Europe has massive problems with.

Racist Americans can live more easily with Catholic Latino immigrants, better than racist Europeans can live with Muslim immigrants.

[alephnerd]

A lot of that is predicated on the fact that a CS major in China (and other countries like India, Israel, the CEE) also studied CompArch, OS, and other "low level" disciplines which we in the US don't treat as CS anymore, which leads to a lack of understanding of how to integrate hardware with software.

The fact that DSP is a CSE major requirement abroad, but optional in much of the US aside from ECE programs (but even they have now gated DSP to those ECEs who want to specialize in EE) highlights this issue.

Can't reply so replying here:

> There are lots of young whippersnappers and “old timers” in the “west” who could easily do the Low level make it quick on small hardware stuff

Not to the same degree. The total number of CE graduates (from BS to PhD) is 19k per year in the US.

A large number of those were not introduced to table stakes CS classes like programming language design or theory of computation.

Conversely, for CS major, they are not introduced to intro circuits, digital logic design, DSP, comp arch, and in some cases even OS development because there was a pivot in how CS curricula for undergrads was designed over the past 10 years.

> in the context of adoption as opposed to frontier development.

For real world applications like military applications or dual use technology, frontier development is not relevant. It's important but it's not what wins wars or defines industries.

Being able to develop frontier models but being unable to productionize foundational models from scratch for sub-$2M like Deepseek did despite paying US level salaries highlights a major problem.

And this is the crux of the issue. The best engineers are those who recognize what is "good enough".

Americans who did their undergrad here over the past 10 years act more like "artists" who want to build to perfection irrespective of whether it actually meets tangible needs or is scalable.

> We aren’t actually engineers, we didn’t get to take classes in the engineering college, maybe we should have

Which is the crux of my argument.

CS is an engineering discipline, and some of the best CS undergrad programs in the US like Stanford, Cal, MIT, and UCLA make sure to enforce Engineering requirements for CS majors.

The shift of CS from being a department within a "College of Engineering" to being offered as a BA/BS in the "College of Arts and Sciences" sans engineering requirements is a recentish change from what I've seen.

> Incidentally a lot of AI movers are EEs, not even CSE or CEE.

Yep! Gotta love Information Theory and Optimization Theory. And a major reason I feel requiring a dual-use course like DSP for CS/CE majors is critical.

[wood_spirit]

There are lots of young whippersnappers and “old timers” in the “west” who could easily do the Low level make it quick on small hardware stuff, the US companies just aren’t asking us to?

[seanmcdirmid]

Computer science doesn’t have the EE pre-requisites to do DSP while computer engineering does. We aren’t actually engineers, we didn’t get to take classes in the engineering college, maybe we should have.

Incidentally a lot of AI movers are EEs, not even CSE or CEE.

[lunar-whitey]

ECE is a compromise track that limits how far one can progress on hard systems design problems. An ECE’s principal strength is that they tend to manage long term software projects better than EEs.

EEs lead in anything that is limited by physics because that is how the discipline is oriented. The bleeding edge of compute has been like this since the first microprocessors were created, at the very latest.

[seanmcdirmid]

DSP gave them an edge in an, even for the purely software stuff. They were also living linear algebra before we were.

[bogomipz]

I am not disputing or arguing the the reasons for it. I was simply pointing out that the "falling behind" part in the article was more in the context of adoption as opposed to pure development.