6 ms·

The German problem? It's an analogue country in a digital world

34 points by doener 2y ago

merb 2y ago
> Since 2018, Germany has been the slowest-growing economy in the G7 – expanding by 0.4% a year on average. While the rest of the eurozone’s big four – France, Italy and Spain – have been showing signs of recovering from the slowdown caused by the Ukraine war-induced energy shock Hm https://xkcd.com/1102/ https://xkcd.com/1102/
- blululu 2y ago
  France is the world’s seventh largest economy. Achieving growth is not trivial for an advanced and mature economy.
  - merb 2y ago
    Well the article is shit. Of course Germany might have a slower economic growth. But let’s be real comparing it with countries behind Germany is useless, because at some point they will catch up. The second part is than some bullshit take that Germany does not invest enough in ai.
- formerly_proven 2y ago
  Those three have a combined GDP of about 6.3bn€, compared to germany at 4.2bn€. And at least France and arguably Italy are what you might wanna call a "full stack economy" as well. However, they also have 176 million people vs. 83 million. So those three have even lower productivity than germans, funny as that might sound.
- codemonke 2y ago
  France: biggest user of nuclear, warmer than Germany. Italy/Spain: Definitely warmer than Germany. I don't think they were ever hit as hard by the energy crisis as Germany was in the first place. And Spain has direct gas pipelines from North Africa.
ainiriand 2y ago
I live in Germany since a few years not and I find so sad to see that they do not have any interconnected services and that there is so much red tape for everything. The different health suppliers are not interconnected so they cannot send even the most basic things digitally, everything is posted to you and you take it to the other supplier. It is not uncommon to receive CDs for x-rays or similar to take to another specialist. Makes you cringe. And do not get me started on internet connections!
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  > It is not uncommon to receive CDs for x-rays or similar to take to another specialist Funny, as when I had to be admitted in germany (I was on vacation there), the German staff was saying how backward NL was for having to send a dvd with x rays instead of just emailing it encrypted.
  - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
    This happens in the US as well.
- DoingIsLearning 2y ago
  > It is not uncommon to receive CDs for x-rays or similar to take to another specialist. Makes you cringe. As a counter point I have (in multiple industrialized countries) asked for DICOM files of my exams (following past injuries) to keep with me, since I changed countries a far bit. I always got confused shoulder shrugs from staff since there is never a "procedure" to safely share it outside their PACS. At best I only got grubby screenshots in a pdf report, and only once I got a physical CD because I had a bit of small talk with the Radiography Technician directly. I am not saying Germany is great but there is absolutely value in having physical offline storage of your data.
- blululu 2y ago
  As an open question when are CD’s the best way to store data? X-ray scans with high resolution and high bit depth take up a lot of space though they are accessed infrequently and always in the full. For a 12x18 600 dpi scan with 64 bit depth is 0.6 GB. If these are tomograms and you need a stack of 1200-2000 then we are talking about a lot of data to store for several years to be accessed twice. A CD is not a bad choice for durable storage.
supermatt 2y ago
What a stupid article. Their benchmark for digital relevance? The number of AI startups... Sure, Germany has had less recent growth than any other G7 member - but it is also among the highest GDP per capita of the G7, highest GDP in Europe, and 3rd highest in the world.
- jjallen 2y ago
  Absolute numbers matter but growth m, or lack thereof, also matters for the future. If the economy isn’t growing it’s actually shrinking due to inflation.
  - antimemetics 2y ago
    Do most AI startups produce something of sustainable, lasting value ?
  - supermatt 2y ago
    Sure, but you cant take a SINGLE YEAR and extrapolate that for the future. If you look at the previous year Germany had 20% more growth than the UK - which they tout as having more than 2.5x the AI startups. If you look at growth since pre-covid times the German economy has grown at the same rate as the UK - even accounting for the Russian energy crisis, on which Germany was HIGHLY dependent. Germany has been mostly stable throughout, while the UK was hit hard through COVID and has simply recovered. The whole article is just a load of hot air.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - mytailorisrich 2y ago
    GDP per capita is more telling, IMHO. Major European countries are encouraging high immigration to boost overall GDP numbers but the result is higher population growth than GDP growth. Ie. GDP per capita is decreasing and hence, in reality people are getting poorer. For instance, it seems that Germany's population grew by more than 0.4% in 2023 (between 0.5 and 0.8% from what I can find online)... Certainly, in the UK's case the GDP growth is only due to the frantic influx of people but GDP per capita is going down.
zarzavat 2y ago
> The US and the UK have 5.22 AI startups for each 100,000 inhabitants; Germany has 1.9 It’s cute when journalists try to do things with numbers. This is a very weird sentence. Firstly, what is number of AI startups per capita a metric of? Some AI startups are more important than others. Secondly why are US and UK lumped together? I assume they don’t each have precisely 5.22 AI startups per 100k inhabitants, so is this the combined total of their populations? Why combine those two countries? Why not combine US and Canada, or UK and France, or US and Japan?
- freilanzer 2y ago
  > what is number of AI startups per capita a metric of? A ratio of the number of startups and a certain amount of people. It definitely shows that founding a startup in Germany is not as easy as in other countries.
  - consp 2y ago
    By lumping the UK together with the US it says absolutely nothing about either the UK or the US.
  - elthran 2y ago
    It doesn't necessarily show that at all as an isolated statistic - it could be telling us that Germany has less people who are convinced an AI startup is a sensible business decision, or any other number of population based factors
  - leononame 2y ago
    It definitely does not show that, it's just a number and you're interpreting it. But other interpretations are just as valid, e.g. - Germans founding less because they're more risk-averse - having less AI startups because other types of companies are founded more often - Less wish to found because of a strong job market that gives you excellent jobs with decision power/money/whatever it is you seek in founding yourself - People have more families and don't want to quit their current jobs I probably could come up with more. Is it a hassle to found a new company in Germany? Sure. But I've found that for people who do want to start something, that's not a showstopper. Personally, I would attribute low startup numbers to cultural risk aversion of Germans
dartharva 2y ago
> It saw no reason to change the model and invested too little in physical, human and digital infrastructure. > The US is the prime example of a country that has moved with the times and has been able to adapt its industrial structure to changing circumstances. What model? What change? What "physical, human and digital" infrastructure investments? What adaptations? This article is shit. An average 7th grader can write better.
- yourusername 2y ago
  >This article is shit. An average 7th grader can write better. The article has one original observation: the faulty metric for comparing US+UK AI startups to German AI startups. The rest seem like paragraphs fully recycled from other articles (background on east Germany, Germany's network of small companies, etc). This article should have been a tweet.
openrisk 2y ago
> the new growth sectors – smartphones, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence (AI). An analogue world is rapidly going digital, and Germany has been painfully slow to realize that There is an important silver lining in being "slow". You learn from the mistakes of the "fast" ones. You don't need to look too deeply in the "move fast and break things" tech sector to see not just mistakes but major disasters: destroying people's privacy and agency, historically unprecedented power concentration, rampant regulatory arbitrage, demolition of important sectors such as journalism etc. The real issue is that Germany (as key actor within the EU) has been for some time paying lip service to an alternative, less dystopic "digital world", but not delivering.
BlackFly 2y ago
This article appears to simply be UK propaganda to convince UK citizens not to copy German regulation. The argument seems to be that they are addicted to older industry and thus their economic growth (dubiously but traditionally measured via GDP growth) is slowest among the G7. They list other countries like France and Italy that arguably are similarly attached to older industy but the article doesn't analyse this apparent contradiction since presumably it doesn't further their agenda. Meanwhile I (an EU resident not residing in Germany) am using a German digital bank, a German digital broker, but a Swiss replacements for a lot of google services. I am a bit reluctant to do business with UK digital services and definitely see it as a negative when I am shopping around among alternatives because EU regulation has been a boon for me personally when dealing with companies behaving poorly. While EU regulation surely prevails when UK businesses sell to me, I'd just rather skip them.
- lynx23 2y ago
  Well, an explanation that uses the word propaganda in the first paragraph has likely an agenda as well. Have you been listening recently while you reside in Europe? Germany has so many problems, its no longer funny.
laydn 2y ago
Seems like Germany is having this problem for the past 20 years... but here we are. Maybe accept the fact that they are a manufacturing powerhouse and will remain so in the foreseeable future?
heisenbit 2y ago
Cars are the key industry in Germany and similar to the US albeit in a less extreme manner moving towards premium combustion cars has Germany caught in a local optimum which is now shrinking due to external change. Investing in AI is not going to fix that manufacturing restructuring problem in Germany. Nor will asking an AI to write superficial feel good articles for British readers where manufacturing problems are endemic, the Brexit transition and solving the over dependence on Londons financial ‚industry‘ is far from a solved issue.
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  Well, arguably it is linked. A big issue with Germany's car industry is that it is slow to adapt and innovate and so now faces being hit by competition from China. Slow pace of change and adaptation is perhaps something also at play with AI.
teajunky 2y ago
I take a very positive view of the fact that German society is not yet fully digitalized and that some developments are viewed rather critically and are only adopted in part. Ultimately, I see adaptability as a particular strength of Germany. There is always a willingness to learn from mistakes and improve. In a pluralistic society, this sometimes takes time, but I am sure that Germany is still on the right track. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Germany was often referred to as “the sick man of Europe”. That may now be the case again in the eyes of some people, but this will only be a transitional phase.
Nevermark 2y ago
The problems with the logic I see are: 1. Several years of lower growth, after years of higher growth, can have many causes. Many might be temporary, or reflect nontrivial time dynamics between growth factors & their results. 2. The digital transition was long in place before 2018. So that linkage looks very weak. 3. AI GDP growth due to AI is just getting going anywhere. So no link at all to those last several years. 4. Startup numbers don’t always reflect industry adoption numbers. Growth comes from many places. I do think AI is going to eat up a lot of the economy. It is ultimately a foundational tech, like electricity & computation. And with high specialization potential, like software. And AI tech has been improving quickly for many years now. But even with explosive growth that will take time. I expect a lot of bright people in Germany are aware of that likelihood.
southernplaces7 2y ago
As for the premise of the title alone: Good. Such a thing would be a welcome respite (if imperfect given the practical pervasiveness of digitization) from an ever more grossly digitized world of bullshit "optimization" that heavily serves as a cover for grotesque normalization of surveillance, social control, soft authoritarianism and centralized tracking across the board. That such a title comes from a UK paper, from a country with a fundamentally sick level of social monitoring and essentially Orwellian levels of needing to spy on everything possible before selectively deeming it offensive, is amusing. As for the article's content: It's half-baked screed about Germany being economically doomed by a contrived mishmash of fragmentary arguments that the author poorly defines or seems to understand. His strange blurbs about the dangers of the far right in Germany (this having to do what with digitization?) are just nonsensical. If anything, Germany is in political practice considerably more progressive than the UK has been for years, and in any case it's a long way from facing a resurgence of anything seriously resembling Nazism. The Guardian sometimes posts interesting news, but more often than not, especially for opinion pieces, one wonders if its writers are capable of pulling their heads out of their asses long enough to string one coherent idea with another one.
woodpanel 2y ago
Out of all industrial nations intent to put Germany (rightfully) to shame I'd say Great Britain is one of the worst examples. Specifically UK's economic model of centralization towards London and its financial hub has been rather destructive to the rest of the nation. PS: And if the idiotic propping up of AI as the focus-point of whether a society fares well or not continues, then I'll guess we'll at some point see what we've seen with other "crucial sectors" across europe before: Nations backing/establishing local market "champions". Think AI city works (bad in quality but rich in government contracts).

34 points by doener 2y ago

merb 2y ago

> Since 2018, Germany has been the slowest-growing economy in the G7 – expanding by 0.4% a year on average. While the rest of the eurozone’s big four – France, Italy and Spain – have been showing signs of recovering from the slowdown caused by the Ukraine war-induced energy shock Hm https://xkcd.com/1102/ https://xkcd.com/1102/

blululu 2y ago
France is the world’s seventh largest economy. Achieving growth is not trivial for an advanced and mature economy.
- merb 2y ago
  Well the article is shit. Of course Germany might have a slower economic growth. But let’s be real comparing it with countries behind Germany is useless, because at some point they will catch up. The second part is than some bullshit take that Germany does not invest enough in ai.
formerly_proven 2y ago
Those three have a combined GDP of about 6.3bn€, compared to germany at 4.2bn€. And at least France and arguably Italy are what you might wanna call a "full stack economy" as well. However, they also have 176 million people vs. 83 million. So those three have even lower productivity than germans, funny as that might sound.
codemonke 2y ago
France: biggest user of nuclear, warmer than Germany. Italy/Spain: Definitely warmer than Germany. I don't think they were ever hit as hard by the energy crisis as Germany was in the first place. And Spain has direct gas pipelines from North Africa.

ainiriand 2y ago

I live in Germany since a few years not and I find so sad to see that they do not have any interconnected services and that there is so much red tape for everything. The different health suppliers are not interconnected so they cannot send even the most basic things digitally, everything is posted to you and you take it to the other supplier. It is not uncommon to receive CDs for x-rays or similar to take to another specialist. Makes you cringe. And do not get me started on internet connections!

anonzzzies 2y ago
> It is not uncommon to receive CDs for x-rays or similar to take to another specialist Funny, as when I had to be admitted in germany (I was on vacation there), the German staff was saying how backward NL was for having to send a dvd with x rays instead of just emailing it encrypted.
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  This happens in the US as well.
DoingIsLearning 2y ago
> It is not uncommon to receive CDs for x-rays or similar to take to another specialist. Makes you cringe. As a counter point I have (in multiple industrialized countries) asked for DICOM files of my exams (following past injuries) to keep with me, since I changed countries a far bit. I always got confused shoulder shrugs from staff since there is never a "procedure" to safely share it outside their PACS. At best I only got grubby screenshots in a pdf report, and only once I got a physical CD because I had a bit of small talk with the Radiography Technician directly. I am not saying Germany is great but there is absolutely value in having physical offline storage of your data.
blululu 2y ago
As an open question when are CD’s the best way to store data? X-ray scans with high resolution and high bit depth take up a lot of space though they are accessed infrequently and always in the full. For a 12x18 600 dpi scan with 64 bit depth is 0.6 GB. If these are tomograms and you need a stack of 1200-2000 then we are talking about a lot of data to store for several years to be accessed twice. A CD is not a bad choice for durable storage.

supermatt 2y ago

What a stupid article. Their benchmark for digital relevance? The number of AI startups... Sure, Germany has had less recent growth than any other G7 member - but it is also among the highest GDP per capita of the G7, highest GDP in Europe, and 3rd highest in the world.

jjallen 2y ago
Absolute numbers matter but growth m, or lack thereof, also matters for the future. If the economy isn’t growing it’s actually shrinking due to inflation.
- antimemetics 2y ago
  Do most AI startups produce something of sustainable, lasting value ?
- supermatt 2y ago
  Sure, but you cant take a SINGLE YEAR and extrapolate that for the future. If you look at the previous year Germany had 20% more growth than the UK - which they tout as having more than 2.5x the AI startups. If you look at growth since pre-covid times the German economy has grown at the same rate as the UK - even accounting for the Russian energy crisis, on which Germany was HIGHLY dependent. Germany has been mostly stable throughout, while the UK was hit hard through COVID and has simply recovered. The whole article is just a load of hot air.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  GDP per capita is more telling, IMHO. Major European countries are encouraging high immigration to boost overall GDP numbers but the result is higher population growth than GDP growth. Ie. GDP per capita is decreasing and hence, in reality people are getting poorer. For instance, it seems that Germany's population grew by more than 0.4% in 2023 (between 0.5 and 0.8% from what I can find online)... Certainly, in the UK's case the GDP growth is only due to the frantic influx of people but GDP per capita is going down.

zarzavat 2y ago

> The US and the UK have 5.22 AI startups for each 100,000 inhabitants; Germany has 1.9 It’s cute when journalists try to do things with numbers. This is a very weird sentence. Firstly, what is number of AI startups per capita a metric of? Some AI startups are more important than others. Secondly why are US and UK lumped together? I assume they don’t each have precisely 5.22 AI startups per 100k inhabitants, so is this the combined total of their populations? Why combine those two countries? Why not combine US and Canada, or UK and France, or US and Japan?

freilanzer 2y ago
> what is number of AI startups per capita a metric of? A ratio of the number of startups and a certain amount of people. It definitely shows that founding a startup in Germany is not as easy as in other countries.
- consp 2y ago
  By lumping the UK together with the US it says absolutely nothing about either the UK or the US.
- elthran 2y ago
  It doesn't necessarily show that at all as an isolated statistic - it could be telling us that Germany has less people who are convinced an AI startup is a sensible business decision, or any other number of population based factors
- leononame 2y ago
  It definitely does not show that, it's just a number and you're interpreting it. But other interpretations are just as valid, e.g. - Germans founding less because they're more risk-averse - having less AI startups because other types of companies are founded more often - Less wish to found because of a strong job market that gives you excellent jobs with decision power/money/whatever it is you seek in founding yourself - People have more families and don't want to quit their current jobs I probably could come up with more. Is it a hassle to found a new company in Germany? Sure. But I've found that for people who do want to start something, that's not a showstopper. Personally, I would attribute low startup numbers to cultural risk aversion of Germans

dartharva 2y ago

> It saw no reason to change the model and invested too little in physical, human and digital infrastructure. > The US is the prime example of a country that has moved with the times and has been able to adapt its industrial structure to changing circumstances. What model? What change? What "physical, human and digital" infrastructure investments? What adaptations? This article is shit. An average 7th grader can write better.

yourusername 2y ago
>This article is shit. An average 7th grader can write better. The article has one original observation: the faulty metric for comparing US+UK AI startups to German AI startups. The rest seem like paragraphs fully recycled from other articles (background on east Germany, Germany's network of small companies, etc). This article should have been a tweet.

openrisk 2y ago

> the new growth sectors – smartphones, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence (AI). An analogue world is rapidly going digital, and Germany has been painfully slow to realize that There is an important silver lining in being "slow". You learn from the mistakes of the "fast" ones. You don't need to look too deeply in the "move fast and break things" tech sector to see not just mistakes but major disasters: destroying people's privacy and agency, historically unprecedented power concentration, rampant regulatory arbitrage, demolition of important sectors such as journalism etc. The real issue is that Germany (as key actor within the EU) has been for some time paying lip service to an alternative, less dystopic "digital world", but not delivering.

BlackFly 2y ago

This article appears to simply be UK propaganda to convince UK citizens not to copy German regulation. The argument seems to be that they are addicted to older industry and thus their economic growth (dubiously but traditionally measured via GDP growth) is slowest among the G7. They list other countries like France and Italy that arguably are similarly attached to older industy but the article doesn't analyse this apparent contradiction since presumably it doesn't further their agenda. Meanwhile I (an EU resident not residing in Germany) am using a German digital bank, a German digital broker, but a Swiss replacements for a lot of google services. I am a bit reluctant to do business with UK digital services and definitely see it as a negative when I am shopping around among alternatives because EU regulation has been a boon for me personally when dealing with companies behaving poorly. While EU regulation surely prevails when UK businesses sell to me, I'd just rather skip them.

lynx23 2y ago
Well, an explanation that uses the word propaganda in the first paragraph has likely an agenda as well. Have you been listening recently while you reside in Europe? Germany has so many problems, its no longer funny.

laydn 2y ago

Seems like Germany is having this problem for the past 20 years... but here we are. Maybe accept the fact that they are a manufacturing powerhouse and will remain so in the foreseeable future?

heisenbit 2y ago

Cars are the key industry in Germany and similar to the US albeit in a less extreme manner moving towards premium combustion cars has Germany caught in a local optimum which is now shrinking due to external change. Investing in AI is not going to fix that manufacturing restructuring problem in Germany. Nor will asking an AI to write superficial feel good articles for British readers where manufacturing problems are endemic, the Brexit transition and solving the over dependence on Londons financial ‚industry‘ is far from a solved issue.

mytailorisrich 2y ago
Well, arguably it is linked. A big issue with Germany's car industry is that it is slow to adapt and innovate and so now faces being hit by competition from China. Slow pace of change and adaptation is perhaps something also at play with AI.

teajunky 2y ago

I take a very positive view of the fact that German society is not yet fully digitalized and that some developments are viewed rather critically and are only adopted in part. Ultimately, I see adaptability as a particular strength of Germany. There is always a willingness to learn from mistakes and improve. In a pluralistic society, this sometimes takes time, but I am sure that Germany is still on the right track. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Germany was often referred to as “the sick man of Europe”. That may now be the case again in the eyes of some people, but this will only be a transitional phase.

Nevermark 2y ago

The problems with the logic I see are: 1. Several years of lower growth, after years of higher growth, can have many causes. Many might be temporary, or reflect nontrivial time dynamics between growth factors & their results. 2. The digital transition was long in place before 2018. So that linkage looks very weak. 3. AI GDP growth due to AI is just getting going anywhere. So no link at all to those last several years. 4. Startup numbers don’t always reflect industry adoption numbers. Growth comes from many places. I do think AI is going to eat up a lot of the economy. It is ultimately a foundational tech, like electricity & computation. And with high specialization potential, like software. And AI tech has been improving quickly for many years now. But even with explosive growth that will take time. I expect a lot of bright people in Germany are aware of that likelihood.

southernplaces7 2y ago

As for the premise of the title alone: Good. Such a thing would be a welcome respite (if imperfect given the practical pervasiveness of digitization) from an ever more grossly digitized world of bullshit "optimization" that heavily serves as a cover for grotesque normalization of surveillance, social control, soft authoritarianism and centralized tracking across the board. That such a title comes from a UK paper, from a country with a fundamentally sick level of social monitoring and essentially Orwellian levels of needing to spy on everything possible before selectively deeming it offensive, is amusing. As for the article's content: It's half-baked screed about Germany being economically doomed by a contrived mishmash of fragmentary arguments that the author poorly defines or seems to understand. His strange blurbs about the dangers of the far right in Germany (this having to do what with digitization?) are just nonsensical. If anything, Germany is in political practice considerably more progressive than the UK has been for years, and in any case it's a long way from facing a resurgence of anything seriously resembling Nazism. The Guardian sometimes posts interesting news, but more often than not, especially for opinion pieces, one wonders if its writers are capable of pulling their heads out of their asses long enough to string one coherent idea with another one.

woodpanel 2y ago

Out of all industrial nations intent to put Germany (rightfully) to shame I'd say Great Britain is one of the worst examples. Specifically UK's economic model of centralization towards London and its financial hub has been rather destructive to the rest of the nation. PS: And if the idiotic propping up of AI as the focus-point of whether a society fares well or not continues, then I'll guess we'll at some point see what we've seen with other "crucial sectors" across europe before: Nations backing/establishing local market "champions". Think AI city works (bad in quality but rich in government contracts).