I want to thank everyone who contributed to this thread. The variety of experiences and viewpoints provided an incredible insight to someone who's been mostly i

I want to thank everyone who contributed to this thread. The variety of experiences and viewpoints provided an incredible insight to someone who's been mostly in the USA for the last 2 decades. My conclusions: a) There's not a snowball's chance in Hell that a European AI hub compete with the US, b) Europe remains far more fragmented than I thought it was; even more fragmented than it appeared when I was in high school. "Brexit" may actually increase Europe's (and Britain's) organization. c) Britain and Europe have tons of good people but a lack of organization suitable for pure research, be it by governments, corporations, "hubs", or non-governmental organizations. d) China is similarly SNAFU'd but worse in some respects (unsettled markets, lack of transparency & property rights). Luckily, there doesn't appear to be a ghost of a chance of having one of China's many languages adopted as a scientific "lingua franca". [Note to self: cross the (formerly) relevant item off my "bucket list".] e) Perhaps restoring near-universal use of the character encoding UTF-16 or even US-ASCII is not a completely dead idea but merely one to be delayed until the adoption of English as the "lingua franca" of the Internet and Europe, salvaging much-needed bandwidth. Time will tell.