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Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation

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Re: Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation

#291

Post by AsyncAwait »

pldr1234 wrote: post #234
malka wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US ? Ethics ? I just choked on my coffee.

Such tunnel-minded posters. The GP clearly meant the US is ethical RELATIVE to other countries currently "innovating" i.e. China. Even as stoutly anti-American as my country and people are, I still fervently hope it's the USA and NOT China who prevail in future techno/political battles.

Granted, when the U.S. was as old as the current Chinese government is, it had officially sanctioned slavery in place.

My theory is that as countries become stronger and more confident that they can withstand internal pressures without outsiders immediately being able to take advantage of them, they'll slowly become more and more democratic as they prosper.

I think this is vastly preferable than having the CIA install a pro-US puppet regime that is deeply unpopular and will only lead to another coup, meaning investors are not confident in the country being stable enough for investment and the populations suffer.

Re: Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation

#292

Post by wbl »

lgleason wrote: post #69

"This high skills immigration is crucial to American competitiveness, global competitiveness, building these new companies and so forth," he said. "America does not have enough people with those skills." Translation -- US software engineer salaries are still too high for his liking, so he wants to dilute the market with more to lower the overall cost.

Immigration increases labor demand as well as labor supply. It also permits more specialization.

Re: Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation

#293

Post by AsyncAwait »

swinglock wrote: post #198
thewarrior wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States balances innovation with ethics ? The people of Hiroshima or the victims of agent orange might have something to say about that.

Do you actually think damages caused in actual wars are somehow comparable to those in peace time technical development? What do you really mean by that?

This is comping directly from the DoD, so the military. And yes, the military uses peacetime to develop technologies to be used later in war to devastating effects.

Re: Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation

#294

Post by robjan »

justcomments12 wrote: post #224

Google search is controlled by large (Chinese) botnets. Given that Google has >= 90% of the search market, the ball seems dropped right there. For instance, a botnet includes thousands of sites including xxxcommitted, pornsextube, qastack, thecouponholiday etc edit: thanks for down vote Xi

Spammers linking to your site doesn't prove that Google is operated by a Chinese botnet

Re: Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation

#295

Post by joshuaissac »

wbl wrote: post #286
fvdessen wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was still not that long ago an incredible amount of innovative companies and products in Europe. But at that time companies were still built for their home markets first and on that regard the USA is big and unified. Since software is mostly winner takes all it means that when the USA companies came to Europe they had already won the USA and could steamroll the local competition There is for example no way a sw…

Europe has the single market, and lots of English speakers. But it also has very conservative capital and tax and employment systems that make entrepreneurship difficult. Some of that is easy to fix, some hard to fix.

Despite the name, the European Single Market is far less unified than that of the US. A company starting out in Europe will have to overcome linguistic, cultural and regulatory barriers in 27 different countries. While American companies still have to deal with regulatory differences across state borders, it is not quite the same as what European start-ups face.

Re: Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation

#296

Post by wombatmobile »

ma2rten wrote: post #38

I am not sure what he is talking about. I work on AI/Machine Learning and I can't think of any major paper that came out of China.

Papers are one metric. In the case of ML, as with other technologies such as web infrastructure, there comes a point where the state of research plateaus for a while and the main progress is in commercial implementations.

So, for example, autonomous vehicle technology now is more a matter of implementations than theory. This is where China has an advantage over the US by virtue of the willingness of its government to make large scale infrastructure investments. The US once led in such endeavours e.g. Eisenhower's Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 that paid for 90 percent of the cost of construction of Interstate Highways.

Now, in the government domain, the leader is China.

China intends for self-driving cars to propel smart megacity

https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/China-intends-for-self-drivi...

Re: Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation

#297

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

menybuvico wrote: post #290
zegl wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU doesn’t even agree on which alphabet to use, Latin is the most common one but the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets are also official in the union. English is my second language, and while I wouldn’t mind changing the official language of my country, I can’t see that ever happening, there’s just so much culture attached to the language, that would be forgotten together with our language.

Yep. A common European first language would start a process which would result in a terrible loss of local cultural tradition. Cultural suicude for the common good has been suggested before, but I can't imagine that there would be a lot of people who'd agree with it.

I'm sure that some wouldn't mind other's cultural suicide, however.

Re: Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation

#298

Post by mguerville »

irrational wrote: post #278
88840-8855 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your points and agree on your conclusion. Further, I would like to add a few ideas: - innovation in Europe can only scale if we achieve a higher degree of unity in Europe, including one common language, one common jurisdiction and law framework. Localization is just too expensive in Europe and hinders scaling. - a certain degree of protectionism is good. I am a big fan of how China made it. They have a really…

What could the one common language be? English would seem to be the logical choice, but there is no way France would agree to that.

Quite a few large french companies that are global in nature have switched to English first, but for the broader acceptance and the government to officially support English as the unifying language I share your skepticism

Re: Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation

#299

Post by throwawayinfo »

tnolet wrote: post #287
emsy wrote: post #195

Tangential, since this article is about the US and China. But if the US has dropped the ball, then Europe (or the EU specifically) didn't even bother to go to the game. The only thing we're innovative at is coming up with regulations. And I say this as someone who thinks the US tech sector should be under much heavier regulatory scrutiny.

I’d say the EU and euro zone is one of the biggest and boldest innovations in the postwar Western world.

But it's still terribly fragile and Brexit risks the whole thing collapsing. Not necessarily an innovation if it won't stand up to time.

Re: Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation

#300

Post by 0xfaded »

irrational wrote: post #278
88840-8855 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your points and agree on your conclusion. Further, I would like to add a few ideas: - innovation in Europe can only scale if we achieve a higher degree of unity in Europe, including one common language, one common jurisdiction and law framework. Localization is just too expensive in Europe and hinders scaling. - a certain degree of protectionism is good. I am a big fan of how China made it. They have a really…

What could the one common language be? English would seem to be the logical choice, but there is no way France would agree to that.

English may be more acceptable once the UK excited, leaving no favored EU state.
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