Comment by rolymath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rolymath | Hacker News Reader

1) Cool, but when are they actually going to drive my car for me?

2) Any semblance of American technological superiority is pure fantasy at this point. The only area where Americans are truly "advanced" is in selling overpriced SaaS products. There are dozens of Chinese startups with robots just like this—as seen at CES—yet Boston Dynamics is still treated like it’s some untouchable, DARPA-level tech.

3) A lot of this comes down to cost: you can either hire one American fresh grad or a Chinese PhD for the same price.

3) The second reason is cultural: Americans tend to buy solutions, while the Chinese prefer to build them. Even SMEs in China maintain internal dev teams to build custom software for the business, as opposed to paying Salesforce for what is essentially a glorified Excel sheet with sprinkles of automation.

4) America is facing its own innovator's dilemma. The country is currently being run by MBAs and salespeople focused on extracting every last dollar from the consumer instead of providing real value or innovating. Perhaps we're one step beyond the innovators dilemma. The innovators are dead and we are in the corporate greed stage.

5) Americans are completely oblivious to how advanced China has become because of the propaganda they're fed. My personal "aha" moment was when Chinese EVs hit my local market and completely obliterated legacy automakers on both features and price. The American "free" (lol) market is being guarded by politicians but that won't work for long.

#4 is the biggest problem, by an overwhelmingly wide margin. Solve that and everything else fixes itself more or less instantly. Everything is now about money and extracting every single penny possible, instead of about actually achieving things. Even most 'entrepreneurs' are now just starting businesses primarily with the goal of selling them. Everything is broken, because of the pursuit of money became the goal, further compounding by everything being run by people who have no skills except the pursuit of money.

Money should be a means to achieve a thing, not the goal in and of itself. I think the most visible decline came with the increasingly overt goal to charge rent on friggin everything. That's simply not a sustainable or realistic economic model for society and consequently even if it might maximize corporate income in the short to mid-term, in the longterm it's equally catastrophic for them as well.

The micro-financialization or wallstreet-ification of everything is a succinct way I try to describe it to normies

It’s clear to me that the smartest thing China ever did was to limit speculation in the markets. So many human capital in America is wasted pumping up valuations instead of actually building stuff

Every Jane Street hire could be building robots, but instead, they’re trading options and crypto and heck, even market making for prediction markets now

The positive aspect is that there is plenty if venture capital for innovators; the negative one is that those innovations are stifled by various extraction techniques that allow VCs and other investors to get a return on investment.

Crypto is a good example of how the equilibria is hard to maintain, and if the last cycle saw many interesting new products come to life, they all got crushed by ruthless profit-taking from early investors and team members.

Agreed about the venture capital for innovators part, but that has a danger of eventually the tail wagging the dog. Speculative investments enable VCs to fund other speculative investments until the entire chain is only focused on funding speculative products because that's where you get the meatiest exits

Again, see crypto as a prime example - because, at one point, you could command a valuation that was simply not tethered (heh) to reality, you had all these now-dead L1 chains raising $200M+ at $3-5B valuations.

This also leads to a situation where you only end up funding digital plays because the metrics there can be anything. You had these crypto companies raise based on "growth" when that growth was simply coins produced out of thin air and wallets created by the millions with a script.

You can't do that if you're building actual physical products

> the smartest thing China ever did was to limit speculation in the markets. So many human capital in America is wasted pumping up valuations instead of actually building stuff

there was this Chinese company named Baofeng that built a stupid media player by "re-using" open source FFmpeg code, it managed to get itself publicly listed, then had its valuation went up like 50x for doing nothing other being accused for stealing FFmpeg code.

there were lots of discussions at that time how that happened and why the same level of speculation didn't happen on other public tech companies listed on Chinese market, the consensus was pretty sad - tech companies suitable for speculation are listed in the US by default, those listed on Chinese markets are 2nd tier or 3rd tier to start with, they don't offer any meaningful room for speculation.

Unfair reading bordering with propaganda.

On one hand Boston Dynamics showed similar skill robot well before this demo, only without coreography, which is were most of the wow effect comes from here.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UNorxwlZlFk

Heck check were they were 5 years ago

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw&pp=0gcJCUABo7VqN5t...

Things is american research is financed by outcome potential not for grandstanding, and free standing robot that can only do recorded coreography aren't that useful outside factory floors, and factory floors can use ceiling rails or wheels to better effect.

So yeah video is suler cool, but there isn't much to it beyond that to read in terms of capabilities. You seem just to be projecting what the truth you want to be on top of a funny dance.

China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year, more than the rest of the world combined, and has over 2M deployed total. China makes its own robots (57% indigenous) and its rate of robot deployment continues to grow year to year.

Meanwhile, the US installed 34,200, a decrease on the previous year, and virtually all of those were imported.

https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/global-robot-demand-...

Do these dance?

And what was the % of industrial capacity non automated over this percentage increase, because of course an industrializing country will have more manual processes to automate.

You asserted that American research is "financed by outcome potential not for grandstanding". But China is not just building dancing robots, they're also installing tons of industrial robots whose sole purpose is making money right now.

What is the automation gap tho

american research is financed by outcome potential not for grandstanding

Ah yes that explains Tesla...

I visited China in November, the amount of different brands of electric vehicles is staggering. And even small hotels had robots delivering packages or food to the rooms.

What impressed me the most is the amount of EVs on the streets.

Also hardwares availability. I saw some X threads that mentioned how US/EU robotics labs/companies need week to procure new hardwares, Chinese ones need days at most. Cant iterate quickly with that constraint.

Imagine you need weeks to start a new software module development and to procure cloud instances.

As European faced with similar pain points, I would assert it was having those MBAs offshoring everything with a colonial attittude, as if the nations on the received end would only take orders from their masters and not learn to master the technology themselves.

After a while, naturally the locals would buy the white label products that are anyway the same as the branded ones, many times produced on the same factory lines.

My father used to say, every company goes downhill when management takes over, meaning those straight out management schools without any actual business experience on what the company does, and he was kind of right, that is how we hand landed in late stage capitalism and entshitification, in the middle of geopolitics turn over.

These robots might not drive the car for us, but certainly will become part of some police containment unit, regardless if they are remote controlled or AI driven.

Problem is that China had both cost advantage (both human capital and energy) and a large internal market. If as a company you decided not to invest and build a factory in China, you were quickly losing vs your competitor. The solution to this problem for EU and US however won't be as simple..

Once China built an industrial base, and has cheap energy sources, you cannot directly out compete it. You can only try to maintain your own industrial base by locking competitors out of your market. There is no other way. In the end that's the result of globalization - US&EU companies thought they can produce cheap, sell expensive. Instead they trained their own competition, and due to weak IP laws enabled this exodus of industry know-how to China.

Now, if China was a smaller country - let's say Japan or Turkey - this wouldn't be such a huge problem. But for the global economy, having a single country that produces 80% of all consumer goods is also a huge problem. That was never the case before with the US (except maybe directly after WW2). US+Europe, Japan+Korea, Canada, Australia supply chain was much more diverse and distributed.

What happens now is dangerous because in the end the profits are not spread across the world, and economies of scale cause this monopoly to appear, which will be hard to mitigate.

Can countries "slow" down China and move production to diversified locations? For that to work, coordinated tariffs for advanced goods from China would have to be introduced, and production reallocated to multiple other countries - very difficult to execute..

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