Countries and their future comparative advantages
A growing concern of the Trump administration in the United States is the eagerness of Chinese companies to invest in US projects and companies in the field of machine learning, to the point of triggering an increasing scrutiny of this activity and even the possibility of future restrictions.
I recently commented on the case of BigML, a company based in the United States that I advise, which had received a strategic investment from SAIC, the Chinese automotive giant, a by no means isolated event. Now some congressmen have expressed concern about the presence of Chinese investors in US companies working on a technology that many consider strategic, particularly in relation to the military.
In fact, as Andrew Ng comments, who has experience in developing such technologies in the United States and China, it would be better if the US focused on developing this kind of technology rather than trying to restrict access to it by others, mainly because we are talking about technologies that are almost all open source, and because, above all, China, regardless of what the United States does, has already become the world power in some aspects of machine learning, such as deep learning.
This is the classic definition of comparative advantage, applied to something that will be deeply strategic in the future: machine learning. Building on the foundations of being the world’s leading power in assembly and manufacturing, China has been able to incorporate technologies such as robotization to replace routine, repetitive and alienating jobs: many companies involved in assembling the products we use in our day to day have already gone through important reductions in their workforces and are using robots, policies that have made them much more productive, more error free and more competitive in general. In 2017, the country is already the largest market in the world for robots for industrial use, and also manufactures most of the robots it needs through a robotic revolution that has become a kind of national obsession. Education reform aims to equip Chinese citizens with the skills necessary to develop professionally in an increasingly robotized industrial sector, which translates into an increasing capacity for attracting talent in this field worldwide.
For machine learning experts, China has become a kind of promised land, a place where more academic papers are written, more information is shared, more money aggressively invested and more patents registered. This translate into a greater ability to attract talent and the possibility of leading in more areas. The growing role of what until now was the world’s second economy in the technological field could see China leapfrog the Unites States, given the slowdown imposed by the Trump administration in everything that has to do with development of future technologies… with all the “little details” that this entails…
(En español, aquí)
