Distribute More of the Future Here

As seminal science fiction writer William Gibson (supposedly) once said, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” My fear is more of it is being distributed in China, not in the U.S.

We’re supposed to be the country of big dreams. We’re supposed to be the country that invents the future and goes boldly into it (Captain Kirk, after all, was born in Iowa). The list of innovations America helped pioneer, the Nobel Prizes Americans have won, the amounts of patents we file – all speak to our faith in the future and our confidence that we’ll be the ones who get there first. But, more and more, we seem to be looking back, not forward.

I’ve written before about the Trump Administration’s war on science. Its attacks on many of our leading universities may be viewed as culture wars, but they are wars that our country is the casualty of. Historian Garrett M. Graff, writing in The New York Times, put it this way:

What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together.

He laments: “Today, just as China’s own research and development efforts take off, the Trump administration has been erasing this legacy,” and concludes by warning: “If China is able to capitalize on our self-inflicted wounds to invent and secure the future of the 21st century instead, we may find that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project.”

President Trump famously hates EVs, solar energy, and wind turbines, promotes more use of oil, gas, and “clean” coal, and considers climate change a hoax. Well, the future begs to disagree - and so does China.

Some examples:

The New York Times had an in-depth analysis How China Went From Clean Energy Copycat to Global Innovator. Its thesis, supported by several nifty charts and graphs:

Accused for years of copying the technologies of other countries, China now dominates the renewable energy landscape not just in terms of patent filings and research papers, but in what analysts say are major contributions that will help to move the world away from fossil fuels.

“It is the opposite of an accident,” Jenny Wong Leung, an analyst and data scientist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told NYT, adding: “The sheer volume of Chinese investment has been so much larger than in the West. It meant they could build industries from the ground up, all the way through the supply chain.”

Credit: NYT (Source: European Patent Office, Espacenet)

Or there’s Jacob’s Dreyer’s essay, also in NYT, about China’s push in biotech. He asserts:

In its quest to dethrone American dominance in biotech, China isn’t necessarily trying to beat America at its own game. While the U.S. biotech industry is known for incubating cutting-edge treatments and cures, China’s approach to innovation is mostly focused on speeding up manufacturing and slashing costs. The idea isn’t to advance, say, breakthroughs in the gene-editing technology CRISPR; it’s to make the country’s research, development, testing and production of drugs and medical products hyperefficient and cheaper.

Mr. Dreyer thinks that the Trump cuts to research may mean that America’s biotech industry could go from a “homegrown dominance” to “Big American companies will be ever more dependent on the cost advantages and bright young engineers that China offers.”

Then there’s China’s efforts in robotics, As I wrote previously, “…when it comes to robots — especially AI-powered, humanoid ones — the battle may be closer to being over…and the U.S. is not winning.” Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), told The Wall Street Journal: “They have more companies developing humanoids and more government support than anyone else. So, right now, they may have an edge.”

Last week China hosted the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games, and while it was funny seeing robots sometimes fall down or swing wildly at another robot, the breadth and depth of its advances should not be trivialized. The Guardian noted that when it comes to the competition between China and the U.S. on AI, the Games illustrate that “…while the US still has the lead on frontier research, owing in part to Washington’s restrictions on the export of cutting-edge chips to China, Beijing is going all-in on real life applications, such as robotics.”

Or, finally, there’s the furor over “rare earth minerals” as well as other elements critical to modern electronics, such as lithium and copper. China’s recent threat to restrict exports of them put U.S. industry (and the military) in a state of panic. The U.S. used to lead the world in the mining and refining of these, and we still have huge sources of them. The trouble is, for the most part we no longer do either of those, ceding them to China.

I could go into the whole chip manufacturing debacle – again, we invented the industry, then gave it away – but that ground has been well covered. By now hopefully you get the point. China is eagerly looking ahead; we’re not.

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Dan Wang, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, thinks he knows the crux of the problem. His essay in The Atlantic (adopted from his book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future) posits that we have become a nation of lawyers, while China is a nation of engineers. Who, you know: Get. Things. Done.

He writes:

Think about it this way: China is an engineering state, which treats construction projects and technological primacy as the solution to all of its problems, whereas the United States is a lawyerly society, obsessed with protecting wealth by making rules rather than producing material goods. 

The U.S., he charges, “…has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers.” We’re good at writing laws and regulations, taking people to court, and (for the most part) protecting intellectual property, but when it comes to actually building stuff, we’ve gone soft and slow. He says: “The United States has lost the ability to get stuff done as it focuses on procedures rather than results.”

We don’t want China’s reckless approach to environmental damages, its surveillance state, or its censorship of ideas, but, gosh darn it, it’d be nice for the U.S. to get back to making things and making them better.

Look, I’m a Boomer. My future is way shorter than my past. Some of that past I’m nostalgic about. But I’d sure like to see more of the future, and have more of that future invented here.