Via Scoop.it – Creating the Future
China’s booming economy and growing technological infrastructure may thrust it to the forefront of the next generation of computing, many American experts say. China is now the world’s second-largest venture capital market, growing to $7.6 billion from just $2.2 billion in 2005, while the American venture capital market has remained largely stagnant
Via www.nytimes.com
Power in Numbers: China Aims for High-Tech Primacy
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Our confidence that we will remain the world’s premer power because the PRC is not a free system may be badly misplaced. The Chinese Empire was the world’s most technologically advanced society – and probably its most repressive, as there was practically nothing to check the Emperor’s will. More recently, Germany’s Third Reich was in its time the world’s most technologically advanced society – Fortunately for us, the only thing it failed to fully develop was the atomic bomb.
The PRC wil give us a hell of a contest. We HAVE to think of the future and aggressively invest in it, even as our economy is in the doldrums. ESPECIALLY as our economy is in the doldrums If we worry about tax cuts and deregulation now instead of building a future, we will be toast. And we will be toast sooner rather than later. And the only shovel ready project for us twenty years from now is us digging our own graves.
The PRC super computers are right now on a par with us. The national security implication is that they can crack encryption with the same efficiency as ours. And that’s just the beginning. We have only begun to scratch the surface of artificial intelligence, for example. If the focus of our society continues to be on low taxes, deregulation and small government, we are dead meat. And by the way, a government that is small enough to be drowned in a bath tub would have doomed our cause in WWII. Let alone the Cold War.
We can hold on to the torch only if we run fast enough with it.