Op-Ed: Outmanoeuvred, outwitted, and outproduced as America’s weirdness falls badly behind China

It’ll be fundamental grade school history one day, probably soon.  This era will be How China Took Over Technology 101. China is simply blitzing the tech race on the ground.

To describe America’s approach to basic business deployment in the tech sector as inept would be unmitigated flattery. It’s so bad and so backward it barely needs describing, let alone explaining.

From a purely strategic perspective, a more precise description of the current situation over the last couple of years would be “America Gets Lost in its Own Closet”. Big Tech isn’t really calling the shots globally. Nothing like it, and it’s beginning to show.

The perception of superior Western technology is rotting away nicely, too. China has been routinely catching up in all areas of tech deficiency, and the most that Big Tech can do is cling to advanced chip technologies like protective teddy bears.  

China has gone around the chip embargos very easily and for a very simple reason. Adoption of new tech takes time. People simply don’t need top of the line chips for most things.  Routine daily business doesn’t even begin to require that sort of advanced tech. Is your hot dog stand trying to compete with NASA? No? That sort of thing.

Very strange contrasts in how America and China do business

China’s open source strategy is paying off. Open source is a good middle ground for any sort of tech and a reliable base for development. The US/China dichotomy doesn’t have a role at the nuts-and-bolts level.

You can explore open source tech much more easily than proprietary tech. It’s a classic case of hyper-possessive, expensive IP vs practical tech. Guess who’s winning.

Chinese tech also comes with built-in support, hardware production, and working business models. It’s on the ground now. America has produced a much resented and much more highly distrusted AI bubble, where gigantic amounts of capital are generating more press releases than solid business outcomes. This comes with corporate debt on a very strangely defined, evasive basis.

That last line should be a rhetorical statement. It isn’t. There’s an element of real pathos in the fact that much American investment is now transitioning to how to manage, implement, and deploy AI. This situation boils down to “Now we’ve got it, how do we make money out of it?”

China has done the exact opposite. The Chinese are fitting new tech to operational business needs using the more transparent open-source approach. The main obstacle seems to be how fast the customer base can respond.  

Physical AI

Physical AI applies to robotics, real world interactions, and related hardware., This also just happens to be the intersection of high tech and real business. The Chinese have built a vast array of physical AI ready to ship.  

China’s construction of 43,000 smart factories to meet the demands of physical and presumably metaphysical AI was a massive fait accompli in the global market. This is where America is being outproduced at a critical level. It may be impossible for America to bridge the gap in productivity.

Even if America can possibly deliver a coherent response to this level of production, there’s no need to guess where production will be done. Decades of penny-pinching outsourcing and cheapskate bottom-line excuses are ready for retirement. The self-defeating logic of dependence on external production has found a fitting grave marker.

Infantile weirdness = Maximum sales resistance

Even the very real and truly vast range of American science and research can’t penetrate the sheer unmitigated weirdness and irrationality of US policy behaviour. In the most literal sense of the expression “market positioning,” the US is machine-gunning itself in the foot on a daily basis.

You declare war on your own default supplier who also happens to be your biggest competitor.

Your hostility to your trading partners throws you out of your own markets.

Your biggest competitor is now years ahead of you in terms of real production.

You can’t tool up to compete to deliver hard product on that scale in anything less than a decade.

The world is very much out of love with the endless screen time of smug, insular, and apparently infantile billionaires whose worldview stops at the Middle Ages. This level of obsolescent ignorance is a huge anti-selling point for every single word that comes out of the US. American ultra-rich sleaze and hubris isn’t popular even in America, and it’s definitely no incentive for the rest of the world to do business.

China’s main popularity and market positioning problem is the rather blurry perception of hardline old-style communism and anti-Western stances. That could be fixed by simply softening these positions. The Chinese can simply roll back some facets of their international presence and commentary. Doing less would do so much more.  

It would also help if China came to the party on the subject of a cooperative approach to the new threat of AI cyberattacks. A credible international advocate like China would be more than welcome. Particularly as distinct from Big Tech dummies who seem to have no idea how to manage the issues that they created.

This may not be the “Chinese century”. At this rate, it’ll be the “Chinese millennium”.