17 ms·

Interesting how Boeing and Airbus don't manufacture in China, and coincidentally China hasn't been able to produce any viable competitor to those products. Goe

Interesting how Boeing and Airbus don't manufacture in China, and coincidentally China hasn't been able to produce any viable competitor to those products. Goes to show that without easy access to product blueprints/IP at the factories, China is very slow to actually innovate on their own. Hence why I feel the "China will outpace everyone in tech and take over the world" is super overblown. Even their university culture practically encourages cheating in classes to pass, so you have generations of students graduating with weak understanding of the fundamentals. The US is obviously not a perfect meritocracy, but China is super far from that. An economic model where American/European/Japanese/Korean tech is stolen and then friends of politicians are gifted CEO positions of companies that clone that stolen tech...not sustainable at all. If you want a painful example of what I'm talking about, watch the AI debate between Jack Ma and Elon Musk. It's so clear that Ma has an absolutely minuscule understanding of the AI landscape. When robotic manufacturing eventually becomes cheaper and faster than manufacturing in China, meaning they'll no longer have IP to steal, they are in huge trouble.

notahacker 7y ago
Airbus has been manufacturing in China for a while now and Boeing opened a plant more recently. China doesn't make internationally competitive aircraft because making internationally competitive aircraft is very hard.
- KoftaBob 7y ago
  "Asked about the possibility of technology transfer agreements between Boeing and COMAC, Bruns stressed that the purpose of the plant was for installing seats, painting vehicles, and completing the planes’ final delivery. “That’s only a part of what we do in the production of airplanes,” he said."
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  They're way behind schedule, but they are working on it. A recent Wendover video looked at the current state of affairs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjbYloKJX7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjbYloKJX7c
curiousgal 7y ago
Confirmation biais at its finest.
KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago
Yes exactly, China is mostly imitative and their culture and systems makes it so that they cannot innovate on any scale. Their current accomplishments are built on the basis of theft and when once we fix our security they will fall even further behind than they already are.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  It's hard to judge. If you compare China to the old days of USSR - I wouldn't think USSR was that great at creative thinking, either (on a bigger scale). But USSR also maintained multiple closed cities which would contain the smartest people they had in the whole of the union. I am certain if you picked a few people from there they would be of a completely different opinion of what USSR was at the time as well. So I am wondering if modern-day China has those, too. They might not be bringing huge industries to fruition based on their research - but on the other hand they might be working on strategic projects such as submarines, etc that are hard to clearly see behind the usual commercial noise.
  - rauchp 7y ago
    That's an interesting point. Who knows what could actually be going behind closed doors in China? A lot of what we hear from China comes from second hand sources. If the Chinese are doing big things, their government seems pretty tight lipped on revealing breakthroughs and their progress (unlike the USSR.) > I wouldn't think USSR was that great at creative thinking, either (on a bigger scale). True, especially in the later years of the USSR. But they did launch a satellite into space before anyone else. At some point they were creative thinkers, at least.
    - dabeeeenster 7y ago
      The USSR was the first to reach every major milestone in the race to land on the moon, apart from the final one.
      - scarejunba 7y ago
Glawen 7y ago
Airbus does have final assembly lines in china. I guess they have no access to blueprint of components
jcoffland 7y ago
Wow, these are some seriously racist comments.
- curiousgal 7y ago
  Welcome to HN where any China-related topic is treated with the same hostility.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    If this level of "hostility" offends you, please don't read the US-related topics.
- bpodgursky 7y ago
  China is a country, with a different education system, which produces different outcomes and culture. Nobody is making any claim whatsoever about the behavior of Chinese-Americans or Chinese-Europeans. That would be racist.
- KoftaBob 7y ago
  What does race have to do with any of this? I'm discussing their government's economic and academic model. That's like saying criticism of America's healthcare system is racist against whites, because that's their majority ethnic group. If anything, it says a lot about you that you associated everything I said with their ethnicity rather than the government itself.
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
    The term "racism" includes both race-based as well as ethnicity-based stereotyping. See, for example, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism The idea of Chinese companies/universities/etc. being uncreative and over-reliant on imitation and industrial espionage is quite obviously a somewhat tired cliché. I'm certain it makes an appearance in almost every single front page comment threat on the Chinese economy of the last five years or so. There might even be a kernel of truth. But, as others have pointed out, the same was said of Japan and Taiwan before. In such a situation, you should be wary of repeating such stereotypes if you don't have first-hand experience, which I doubt many of those regurgitating that trope have.
akhilcacharya 7y ago
> It's so clear that Ma has an absolutely minuscule understanding of the AI landscape. I have no idea if Jack Ma knows about the ML landscape or not. But it's clear just by taking an anti-alarmist stance he's correct.
vonmoltke 7y ago
> Interesting how Boeing and Airbus don't manufacture in China, and coincidentally China hasn't been able to produce any viable competitor to those products. Actually, they have a narrowbody competitor set to enter production: https://airlinegeeks.com/2018/03/17/20567/ https://airlinegeeks.com/2018/03/17/20567/ Also: > Boeing has built a B737 finishing factory and Airbus has a final A320 final assembly plant in China, with Airbus planning on building a wide-body jet plant in the country as well.
mytailorisrich 7y ago
Airbus manufactures in China. They have a large factory in Tianjin [1]. China is on course to have its own commercial airliner soon [2] [1] https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/news/en/2018/09/airbus--china-assembly-facility-marks-10-years-of-quality-manufa.html https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/news/en/2018/09/airbus--chin... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919
- patfla 7y ago
  Perhaps, but the article itself says that Comac is having problems certifying its (first) commercial airliner. And part of what was targeted was Airbus data relating to certification. I add (first) because I've read about the C919 elsewhere.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Boeing is having problems with its new planes... Designing and building airliners from scratch is not easy but China will get there because it's of strategic importance, and then the current duopoly will be broken.
    - fapjacks 7y ago
      But Boeing's problem isn't an innovation problem. Boeing's problem is ceding engineering decisions to marketing wanks and MBA bros.
  - fock 7y ago
    And I did my first job programming some groce frontends for them to use the inhouse-pipeline of a major Airbus subcontractor, which they rebuil(t/d). The subcontractor did this entirely willingly and I don't blame them, given that Airbus treated them like sh*. Sure they were not the absolute cutting edge business, but they do a solid job and have a strong engineering background (from the times of MBB, DASA & Co. - their IT in the eng department was horrible). And yet when negotiating a contract for a new test (volume of the contract similar to price of the very specialized equipment necessary), Airbus haggled and put taking it inhouse on the table (they could certainly do that, but as the history of german industry shows, this is just an intimidation tactic for mooore profit). So the management started to sell to COMAC (basically acting as an intermediary for another not as well-connected german supplier, which also likes to sell to China but can't get around export regulations...), which is basically a sell out, but apparently we want it that way given the protection politics give those predatory bit companies around here (never hear anyone calling Airbus for fair treatment of their supply chain)
paxys 7y ago
I would still pick a good leader who isn't necessarily a technical expert over Elon Musk's "AI will become self aware and take over the world" schtick.
- KoftaBob 7y ago
  I would think Pascal's Wager can be applied to that. If Musk is wrong, being extra careful with AI will just mean slightly slower development. If he's right and we don't take it seriously, humanity is wiped out. Why take the chance?
  - bjornjaja 7y ago
    AI won’t have to do much— humanity already on course to destroy itself.
  - rebuilder 7y ago
    If you go outside, you might get struck by a car. Why take the chance? Awareness of a risk isn't very helpful if it doesn't come with an understanding of the odds and the costs and benefits involved.
    - CarVac 7y ago
      Pascal's Wager is something you either make or don't make based on your own understanding of the odds of each outcome and the costs of each outcome. Clearly you have a different understanding than Elon.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - c3534l 7y ago
    Pascal's Wager is considered a joke for good reason. It's not any less a terrible argument here than in philosophy.
  - Yessing 7y ago
    I thought that pascal's Wager only works with infinite reward/ punishment. End of humanity is in the grand scheme of things something trivial. It's just happens and then nobody suffers. so there must be a probability low enough to balance it out.
asdadasdsdfdsf 7y ago
"...Ma has an absolutely minuscule understanding of the AI landscape." Has anyone defined consciousness yet?
jkaptur 7y ago
I've conducted technical interviews for approximately 200 students and recent graduates - around 100 each from American and elite Chinese universities. I've seen absolutely zero evidence for your view that "a generation" of Chinese students has graduated with "weak understanding of the fundamentals" compared to Americans. I'm happy to discuss further (surely my interviews are imperfect tests and the samples are biased in some ways), but let's ground the discussion in evidence. Where did you get this idea?
- dvt 7y ago
  > ... technical interviews ... Technical interviews are manufactured tests that can be easily gamed. The idea that any valuable insight can be drawn from them is naïve at best. Further, the post was specifically about innovation -- given this constraint, technical interviews are notoriously bad at separating the wheat from the chaff (e.g. product questions are non-existent in technical interviews). "Fundamentals" can mean different things to different people, but let's not pretend technical interviews are a reliable signal.
  - yomly 7y ago
    You don't know anything about the parent's process so your assumptions are pretty wild The parent's anecdotal experience is still a valuable datapoint in the face of two baseless stereotypes: 1. Chinese educated people lack fundamentals and are ill equipped for innovation 2. Technical interviews are at best a naive mechanism for evaluating candidates
    - dvt 7y ago
      Which of my points do you think are in contention? That technical interviews can be gamed? That product questions aren't asked? Or that technical interviews produce bad signals? Because I have plenty of evidence for all of the above, and the fact that technical hiring is profoundly broken is discussed ad nauseam on HN.
    - mdorazio 7y ago
      You didn't actually offer a refutation of anything the parent comment said.
jlg23 7y ago
> Interesting how Boeing and Airbus don't manufacture in China, and coincidentally China hasn't been able to produce any viable competitor to those products. Already debunked in this thread. > Even their university culture practically encourages cheating It is not like we'd not have this in western culture. They use the same metres we do: titles and names of educational institutions attended. As with every metric. those who understand it exploit it to cheat those who apply it. > An economic model where American/European/Japanese/Korean tech is stolen and then friends of politicians are gifted CEO positions of companies that clone that stolen tech...not sustainable at all. With a billion people behind it, it is actually pretty easy - you just outlive competitors while you pay for the losses out of pocket. And that is what western companies have been championing: If compliance says "we accept the risk", we take the risk. > When robotic manufacturing eventually becomes cheaper and faster than manufacturing in China, meaning they'll no longer have IP to steal, they are in huge trouble. So are we. Who is going to be able to afford the products if we all are replaced by robots in the workplace?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- gruez 7y ago
  > > Interesting how Boeing and Airbus don't manufacture in China, and coincidentally China hasn't been able to produce any viable competitor to those products. >Already debunked in this thread. Seems to be true, although they're only manufacturing interior parts. Certainly nothing high tech.
- i_cant_speel 7y ago
  > Who is going to be able to afford the products if we all are replaced by robots in the workplace? != > When robotic manufacturing eventually becomes cheaper and faster than manufacturing in China That is a straw man argument. Manufacturing is one of the leading frontiers in automation. It's going to be cheaper to manufacture things outside of China due to automation long before a significant enough portion of the workforce is out of work due to automation and unable to afford the manufactured goods.
agumonkey 7y ago
All very plausible, but maybe aerospace is just something they're weak at while getting strong on others (computer vision recently, but maybe that was also stealing I can't say). Anecdotally, the strongest student grade wise I've seen in college was a Chinese one. I don't think she managed to cheat there.
finolex1 7y ago
Virtually every industrialized economy since the Industrial revolution has developed in part by 'borrowing' or stealing existing technology. Not making a moral judgment here, but economically it makes no sense to reinvent the wheel. You might be right that predictions of China's rise is overblown, but we forget how crappy Korean technology was just a couple of decades ago, and there's no reason it can't happen again. Regarding the Ma/Musk debate, that seems like a strawman argument. Ma studied English in college and his strengths are his business and political accumen, not technical ability. There's plenty of people in China with a better understanding of the AI landscape.
- mch82 7y ago
  See the book “Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World” by Steven Johnson for interesting examples of agricultural theft (the history of vanilla was fascinating). Here’s a video lecture from Steve that may include some, but I only just found it while double checking the book title. http://longnow.org/seminars/02017/jan/04/wonderland-how-play-made-modern-world/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02017/jan/04/wonderland-how-play...
Hunisgung 7y ago
> Interesting how Boeing and Airbus don't manufacture in China Airbus has been building aircrafts at a Final Assembly Line in Tianjin since 2009. And many Airbus/Boeing suppliers have formed joint-ventures with Chinese companies to bid on contracts for the C919.
analyst74 7y ago
> Even their university culture practically encourages cheating in classes to pass, so you have generations of students graduating with weak understanding of the fundamentals. There is some truth in that, but it's quite exaggerated and sounds like a conclusion someone without deeper understanding of China AND US would make. If someone only learned about US education system via news sources, the picture being drawn is gonna be quite bleak, sex, drugs, anti-intellectual, bribery for admission, racism, classism, etc. ...while in reality, it's mostly working pretty well, but nobody is getting views by writing about smart and hard working students doing well in school.
- thebokehwokeh2 7y ago
  I think the opposite is the case here. There seems to be a deep sense of pride from Chinese in particular who are able to "game the system" so to speak. There is indeed a majority of the populace who may just be normal folk working hard, but a non-negligible amount do indeed cheat their way through school at a rate that is not even comparable to anywhere in the west.
amluto 7y ago
That’s quite an extrapolation from China’s supposedly lack of a Boeing/Airbus competitor. Does the Comac C919 not count?
yuanchenxi95 7y ago
Jack Ma was an English teacher and does not even know how to use keyboards. You expect him to know what Machine Learning algorithms do?
mmanfrin 7y ago
> Interesting how Boeing and Airbus don't manufacture in China https://qz.com/1497137/boeings-china-plant-delivers-first-jet-a-737-max-for-air-china/ https://qz.com/1497137/boeings-china-plant-delivers-first-je...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dang 7y ago
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. Those discussions are all the same, i.e. predictable, i.e. lacking in curiosity and therefore off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- KoftaBob 7y ago
  My apologies, definitely not my intention. Was more-so a personal rant on the importance of meritocracy. Noted.

notahacker 7y ago

Airbus has been manufacturing in China for a while now and Boeing opened a plant more recently. China doesn't make internationally competitive aircraft because making internationally competitive aircraft is very hard.

KoftaBob 7y ago
"Asked about the possibility of technology transfer agreements between Boeing and COMAC, Bruns stressed that the purpose of the plant was for installing seats, painting vehicles, and completing the planes’ final delivery. “That’s only a part of what we do in the production of airplanes,” he said."
mikepurvis 7y ago
They're way behind schedule, but they are working on it. A recent Wendover video looked at the current state of affairs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjbYloKJX7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjbYloKJX7c

curiousgal 7y ago

Confirmation biais at its finest.

KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago

Yes exactly, China is mostly imitative and their culture and systems makes it so that they cannot innovate on any scale. Their current accomplishments are built on the basis of theft and when once we fix our security they will fall even further behind than they already are.

heavenlyblue 7y ago
It's hard to judge. If you compare China to the old days of USSR - I wouldn't think USSR was that great at creative thinking, either (on a bigger scale). But USSR also maintained multiple closed cities which would contain the smartest people they had in the whole of the union. I am certain if you picked a few people from there they would be of a completely different opinion of what USSR was at the time as well. So I am wondering if modern-day China has those, too. They might not be bringing huge industries to fruition based on their research - but on the other hand they might be working on strategic projects such as submarines, etc that are hard to clearly see behind the usual commercial noise.
- rauchp 7y ago
  That's an interesting point. Who knows what could actually be going behind closed doors in China? A lot of what we hear from China comes from second hand sources. If the Chinese are doing big things, their government seems pretty tight lipped on revealing breakthroughs and their progress (unlike the USSR.) > I wouldn't think USSR was that great at creative thinking, either (on a bigger scale). True, especially in the later years of the USSR. But they did launch a satellite into space before anyone else. At some point they were creative thinkers, at least.
  - dabeeeenster 7y ago
    The USSR was the first to reach every major milestone in the race to land on the moon, apart from the final one.
    - scarejunba 7y ago

Glawen 7y ago

Airbus does have final assembly lines in china. I guess they have no access to blueprint of components

jcoffland 7y ago

Wow, these are some seriously racist comments.

curiousgal 7y ago
Welcome to HN where any China-related topic is treated with the same hostility.
- weberc2 7y ago
  If this level of "hostility" offends you, please don't read the US-related topics.
bpodgursky 7y ago
China is a country, with a different education system, which produces different outcomes and culture. Nobody is making any claim whatsoever about the behavior of Chinese-Americans or Chinese-Europeans. That would be racist.
KoftaBob 7y ago
What does race have to do with any of this? I'm discussing their government's economic and academic model. That's like saying criticism of America's healthcare system is racist against whites, because that's their majority ethnic group. If anything, it says a lot about you that you associated everything I said with their ethnicity rather than the government itself.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  The term "racism" includes both race-based as well as ethnicity-based stereotyping. See, for example, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism The idea of Chinese companies/universities/etc. being uncreative and over-reliant on imitation and industrial espionage is quite obviously a somewhat tired cliché. I'm certain it makes an appearance in almost every single front page comment threat on the Chinese economy of the last five years or so. There might even be a kernel of truth. But, as others have pointed out, the same was said of Japan and Taiwan before. In such a situation, you should be wary of repeating such stereotypes if you don't have first-hand experience, which I doubt many of those regurgitating that trope have.

akhilcacharya 7y ago

> It's so clear that Ma has an absolutely minuscule understanding of the AI landscape. I have no idea if Jack Ma knows about the ML landscape or not. But it's clear just by taking an anti-alarmist stance he's correct.

vonmoltke 7y ago

> Interesting how Boeing and Airbus don't manufacture in China, and coincidentally China hasn't been able to produce any viable competitor to those products. Actually, they have a narrowbody competitor set to enter production: https://airlinegeeks.com/2018/03/17/20567/ https://airlinegeeks.com/2018/03/17/20567/ Also: > Boeing has built a B737 finishing factory and Airbus has a final A320 final assembly plant in China, with Airbus planning on building a wide-body jet plant in the country as well.

mytailorisrich 7y ago

Airbus manufactures in China. They have a large factory in Tianjin [1]. China is on course to have its own commercial airliner soon [2] [1] https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/news/en/2018/09/airbus--china-assembly-facility-marks-10-years-of-quality-manufa.html https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/news/en/2018/09/airbus--chin... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919

patfla 7y ago
Perhaps, but the article itself says that Comac is having problems certifying its (first) commercial airliner. And part of what was targeted was Airbus data relating to certification. I add (first) because I've read about the C919 elsewhere.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  Boeing is having problems with its new planes... Designing and building airliners from scratch is not easy but China will get there because it's of strategic importance, and then the current duopoly will be broken.
  - fapjacks 7y ago
    But Boeing's problem isn't an innovation problem. Boeing's problem is ceding engineering decisions to marketing wanks and MBA bros.
- fock 7y ago
  And I did my first job programming some groce frontends for them to use the inhouse-pipeline of a major Airbus subcontractor, which they rebuil(t/d). The subcontractor did this entirely willingly and I don't blame them, given that Airbus treated them like sh*. Sure they were not the absolute cutting edge business, but they do a solid job and have a strong engineering background (from the times of MBB, DASA & Co. - their IT in the eng department was horrible). And yet when negotiating a contract for a new test (volume of the contract similar to price of the very specialized equipment necessary), Airbus haggled and put taking it inhouse on the table (they could certainly do that, but as the history of german industry shows, this is just an intimidation tactic for mooore profit). So the management started to sell to COMAC (basically acting as an intermediary for another not as well-connected german supplier, which also likes to sell to China but can't get around export regulations...), which is basically a sell out, but apparently we want it that way given the protection politics give those predatory bit companies around here (never hear anyone calling Airbus for fair treatment of their supply chain)

paxys 7y ago

I would still pick a good leader who isn't necessarily a technical expert over Elon Musk's "AI will become self aware and take over the world" schtick.

KoftaBob 7y ago
I would think Pascal's Wager can be applied to that. If Musk is wrong, being extra careful with AI will just mean slightly slower development. If he's right and we don't take it seriously, humanity is wiped out. Why take the chance?
- bjornjaja 7y ago
  AI won’t have to do much— humanity already on course to destroy itself.
- rebuilder 7y ago
  If you go outside, you might get struck by a car. Why take the chance? Awareness of a risk isn't very helpful if it doesn't come with an understanding of the odds and the costs and benefits involved.
  - CarVac 7y ago
    Pascal's Wager is something you either make or don't make based on your own understanding of the odds of each outcome and the costs of each outcome. Clearly you have a different understanding than Elon.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- c3534l 7y ago
  Pascal's Wager is considered a joke for good reason. It's not any less a terrible argument here than in philosophy.
- Yessing 7y ago
  I thought that pascal's Wager only works with infinite reward/ punishment. End of humanity is in the grand scheme of things something trivial. It's just happens and then nobody suffers. so there must be a probability low enough to balance it out.

asdadasdsdfdsf 7y ago

"...Ma has an absolutely minuscule understanding of the AI landscape." Has anyone defined consciousness yet?

jkaptur 7y ago

I've conducted technical interviews for approximately 200 students and recent graduates - around 100 each from American and elite Chinese universities. I've seen absolutely zero evidence for your view that "a generation" of Chinese students has graduated with "weak understanding of the fundamentals" compared to Americans. I'm happy to discuss further (surely my interviews are imperfect tests and the samples are biased in some ways), but let's ground the discussion in evidence. Where did you get this idea?

dvt 7y ago
> ... technical interviews ... Technical interviews are manufactured tests that can be easily gamed. The idea that any valuable insight can be drawn from them is naïve at best. Further, the post was specifically about innovation -- given this constraint, technical interviews are notoriously bad at separating the wheat from the chaff (e.g. product questions are non-existent in technical interviews). "Fundamentals" can mean different things to different people, but let's not pretend technical interviews are a reliable signal.
- yomly 7y ago
  You don't know anything about the parent's process so your assumptions are pretty wild The parent's anecdotal experience is still a valuable datapoint in the face of two baseless stereotypes: 1. Chinese educated people lack fundamentals and are ill equipped for innovation 2. Technical interviews are at best a naive mechanism for evaluating candidates
  - dvt 7y ago
    Which of my points do you think are in contention? That technical interviews can be gamed? That product questions aren't asked? Or that technical interviews produce bad signals? Because I have plenty of evidence for all of the above, and the fact that technical hiring is profoundly broken is discussed ad nauseam on HN.
  - mdorazio 7y ago
    You didn't actually offer a refutation of anything the parent comment said.

jlg23 7y ago

> Interesting how Boeing and Airbus don't manufacture in China, and coincidentally China hasn't been able to produce any viable competitor to those products. Already debunked in this thread. > Even their university culture practically encourages cheating It is not like we'd not have this in western culture. They use the same metres we do: titles and names of educational institutions attended. As with every metric. those who understand it exploit it to cheat those who apply it. > An economic model where American/European/Japanese/Korean tech is stolen and then friends of politicians are gifted CEO positions of companies that clone that stolen tech...not sustainable at all. With a billion people behind it, it is actually pretty easy - you just outlive competitors while you pay for the losses out of pocket. And that is what western companies have been championing: If compliance says "we accept the risk", we take the risk. > When robotic manufacturing eventually becomes cheaper and faster than manufacturing in China, meaning they'll no longer have IP to steal, they are in huge trouble. So are we. Who is going to be able to afford the products if we all are replaced by robots in the workplace?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gruez 7y ago
> > Interesting how Boeing and Airbus don't manufacture in China, and coincidentally China hasn't been able to produce any viable competitor to those products. >Already debunked in this thread. Seems to be true, although they're only manufacturing interior parts. Certainly nothing high tech.
i_cant_speel 7y ago
> Who is going to be able to afford the products if we all are replaced by robots in the workplace? != > When robotic manufacturing eventually becomes cheaper and faster than manufacturing in China That is a straw man argument. Manufacturing is one of the leading frontiers in automation. It's going to be cheaper to manufacture things outside of China due to automation long before a significant enough portion of the workforce is out of work due to automation and unable to afford the manufactured goods.

agumonkey 7y ago

All very plausible, but maybe aerospace is just something they're weak at while getting strong on others (computer vision recently, but maybe that was also stealing I can't say). Anecdotally, the strongest student grade wise I've seen in college was a Chinese one. I don't think she managed to cheat there.

finolex1 7y ago

Virtually every industrialized economy since the Industrial revolution has developed in part by 'borrowing' or stealing existing technology. Not making a moral judgment here, but economically it makes no sense to reinvent the wheel. You might be right that predictions of China's rise is overblown, but we forget how crappy Korean technology was just a couple of decades ago, and there's no reason it can't happen again. Regarding the Ma/Musk debate, that seems like a strawman argument. Ma studied English in college and his strengths are his business and political accumen, not technical ability. There's plenty of people in China with a better understanding of the AI landscape.

mch82 7y ago
See the book “Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World” by Steven Johnson for interesting examples of agricultural theft (the history of vanilla was fascinating). Here’s a video lecture from Steve that may include some, but I only just found it while double checking the book title. http://longnow.org/seminars/02017/jan/04/wonderland-how-play-made-modern-world/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02017/jan/04/wonderland-how-play...

Hunisgung 7y ago

> Interesting how Boeing and Airbus don't manufacture in China Airbus has been building aircrafts at a Final Assembly Line in Tianjin since 2009. And many Airbus/Boeing suppliers have formed joint-ventures with Chinese companies to bid on contracts for the C919.

analyst74 7y ago

> Even their university culture practically encourages cheating in classes to pass, so you have generations of students graduating with weak understanding of the fundamentals. There is some truth in that, but it's quite exaggerated and sounds like a conclusion someone without deeper understanding of China AND US would make. If someone only learned about US education system via news sources, the picture being drawn is gonna be quite bleak, sex, drugs, anti-intellectual, bribery for admission, racism, classism, etc. ...while in reality, it's mostly working pretty well, but nobody is getting views by writing about smart and hard working students doing well in school.

thebokehwokeh2 7y ago
I think the opposite is the case here. There seems to be a deep sense of pride from Chinese in particular who are able to "game the system" so to speak. There is indeed a majority of the populace who may just be normal folk working hard, but a non-negligible amount do indeed cheat their way through school at a rate that is not even comparable to anywhere in the west.

amluto 7y ago

That’s quite an extrapolation from China’s supposedly lack of a Boeing/Airbus competitor. Does the Comac C919 not count?

yuanchenxi95 7y ago

Jack Ma was an English teacher and does not even know how to use keyboards. You expect him to know what Machine Learning algorithms do?

mmanfrin 7y ago

> Interesting how Boeing and Airbus don't manufacture in China https://qz.com/1497137/boeings-china-plant-delivers-first-jet-a-737-max-for-air-china/ https://qz.com/1497137/boeings-china-plant-delivers-first-je...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

dang 7y ago

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. Those discussions are all the same, i.e. predictable, i.e. lacking in curiosity and therefore off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

KoftaBob 7y ago
My apologies, definitely not my intention. Was more-so a personal rant on the importance of meritocracy. Noted.