alt Hacker News1) Cool, but when are they actually going to drive my car for me?
2) Any semblance of American technological superiority is pure fantasy at this point. The only area where Americans are truly "advanced" is in selling overpriced SaaS products. There are dozens of Chinese startups with robots just like this—as seen at CES—yet Boston Dynamics is still treated like it’s some untouchable, DARPA-level tech.
3) A lot of this comes down to cost: you can either hire one American fresh grad or a Chinese PhD for the same price.
3) The second reason is cultural: Americans tend to buy solutions, while the Chinese prefer to build them. Even SMEs in China maintain internal dev teams to build custom software for the business, as opposed to paying Salesforce for what is essentially a glorified Excel sheet with sprinkles of automation.
4) America is facing its own innovator's dilemma. The country is currently being run by MBAs and salespeople focused on extracting every last dollar from the consumer instead of providing real value or innovating. Perhaps we're one step beyond the innovators dilemma. The innovators are dead and we are in the corporate greed stage.
5) Americans are completely oblivious to how advanced China has become because of the propaganda they're fed. My personal "aha" moment was when Chinese EVs hit my local market and completely obliterated legacy automakers on both features and price. The American "free" (lol) market is being guarded by politicians but that won't work for long.
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It’s clear to me that the smartest thing China ever did was to limit speculation in the markets. So many human capital in America is wasted pumping up valuations instead of actually building stuff
Every Jane Street hire could be building robots, but instead, they’re trading options and crypto and heck, even market making for prediction markets now
Also hardwares availability. I saw some X threads that mentioned how US/EU robotics labs/companies need week to procure new hardwares, Chinese ones need days at most. Cant iterate quickly with that constraint.
Imagine you need weeks to start a new software module development and to procure cloud instances.
Unfair reading bordering with propaganda.
On one hand Boston Dynamics showed similar skill robot well before this demo, only without coreography, which is were most of the wow effect comes from here.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UNorxwlZlFk
Heck check were they were 5 years ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw&pp=0gcJCUABo7VqN5t...
Things is american research is financed by outcome potential not for grandstanding, and free standing robot that can only do recorded coreography aren't that useful outside factory floors, and factory floors can use ceiling rails or wheels to better effect.
So yeah video is suler cool, but there isn't much to it beyond that to read in terms of capabilities. You seem just to be projecting what the truth you want to be on top of a funny dance.
I visited China in November, the amount of different brands of electric vehicles is staggering. And even small hotels had robots delivering packages or food to the rooms.
What impressed me the most is the amount of EVs on the streets.
As European faced with similar pain points, I would assert it was having those MBAs offshoring everything with a colonial attittude, as if the nations on the received end would only take orders from their masters and not learn to master the technology themselves.
After a while, naturally the locals would buy the white label products that are anyway the same as the branded ones, many times produced on the same factory lines.
My father used to say, every company goes downhill when management takes over, meaning those straight out management schools without any actual business experience on what the company does, and he was kind of right, that is how we hand landed in late stage capitalism and entshitification, in the middle of geopolitics turn over.
These robots might not drive the car for us, but certainly will become part of some police containment unit, regardless if they are remote controlled or AI driven.
#4 is the biggest problem, by an overwhelmingly wide margin. Solve that and everything else fixes itself more or less instantly. Everything is now about money and extracting every single penny possible, instead of about actually achieving things. Even most 'entrepreneurs' are now just starting businesses primarily with the goal of selling them. Everything is broken, because of the pursuit of money became the goal, further compounding by everything being run by people who have no skills except the pursuit of money.
Money should be a means to achieve a thing, not the goal in and of itself. I think the most visible decline came with the increasingly overt goal to charge rent on friggin everything. That's simply not a sustainable or realistic economic model for society and consequently even if it might maximize corporate income in the short to mid-term, in the longterm it's equally catastrophic for them as well.