Western Executives Shaken After Visiting China

Anyone who travels quickly discovers how backwards America is for so many things compared to other modernized cities.

were they supposed to just work for you for fraction of a cost forever and don’t learn anything?
It was a rhetorical question, but they actually really believed that. Racism may have been a huge part of it: People as backwards as "China man" would never be able to come up with complicated tasks like setting up a factory on their own.
Anyone not racist saw it coming a thousand miles away. It's weird how much bigotry there was and is in the C-suite of major corporations.
- They are still talking in that "intellectual property domination" and "intelligent jobs" tone. A lot of the supposedly new and liberal globalization was about global segregation.
  And even many people on Lemmy don't get that the western militaries' PR is the same - small forces, technical superiority, organization and logistics are supposed to be equal to Russian or maybe Turkish standing armies of hundreds thousands of people with mass training and mass-produced cheap weaponry.
  That's why they can't even decide on trying to shoot down jets violating their air space, protected by such superior and organized forces.
- I mean, þese people should know better. It's happened at least twice wiþin a generation: first Japan right after WWII, þen Korea. What kind of absolute idiot doesn't see þe pattern? And þese are þe people Wall Street wants running þe corporation?
It's like that Futurama "Scary Door" bit where the scientist creates a robot to automate everything in his life and gets shocked when the robot gets all the credit: https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/The_Scary_Door#Episode_7,_featured_in_the_Futurama_episode_%22Benderama%22
i swear they think all people except themselves are NPCs
That's the famed western thinking in general. I've only seen one western movie where ridicule at that even reminisces the real perception by non-westerners, it's "Romancing the stone".
Marc Twain described that for Americans, that was in a time when USA was simultaneously a weird overseas industrializing village and half the world GDP. So then it could be explained by such a contrast. Now - I don't know.

Oh no, who would have thought that short term thinking would cost us in the long term?

Use human intelligence, foresight, and science to plan society for the future? What are you, some kinda commie?
It's funny that Trump acknowledges China thinks in decades, but hey, money speaks.
Are you suggesting we should let the line go up more slowly so we can still have a business in a few years? That's heresy!
- Kill his whole family and then build my bunker for the "inevitable" apocalypse that I willfully helped to create!

What happened to "A rising tide lifts all boats"?

That ship sailed when the US locked China out of being a customer for our chipsets and other advanced technology. We could have held that over them and made money selling to them, but instead we forced them to bolster their own technological development. And now they beat us in most every aspect of new technology time and again. We just pretend that they dont by not letting Americans be consumers of their products.
Cheap and decent quality electric vehicles? They beat us. Advances in manufacturing? They beat us. Developments in nuclear fusion? Theyre beating us. We may still have an edge in AI, but that is only because of our edge in developing data harvesting search & social media spheres. Eventually, if not quite soon, they will whoop us on that too: since we have separate sources of data harvesting. And while they can buy all the data they want from American companies, the opposite is rarely true
And realistically, the rising tide is lifting a bunch of other boats but ours. People in other countries are happy to buy BYD cars and use Huawei cellphone technology. It makes perfect sense considering that manufacturing is hardly a relevant industry in most countries anymore, the US included. Less than 10% of American jobs are manufacturing jobs. We arent going to be catching up anytime soon, nor anytime at all. But half of American voters are obsessed with trying to revive a dead era of manufacturing despite it making no economic sense. So all we have are overpriced domestic productions, few real manufacturing jobs, and a cratering economy.
Trying to compete with the people we crowned as the world’s manufacturing power is quite plainly a losing affair
- The funniest historical parallel is that USA's own power was collected by being to Europe what China is now. That overseas area of cheap hands.

Slavery provides efficient ways of getting things done. What a surprise.

No it doesn't, slavery wastes an insane amount of potential. And this is far more about automation.
Actually it doesn‘t because exploitation slows down innovation which is why China keeps buying and spying on foreign companies. I would also take everything from futurism.com with a teaspoon of salt. They don‘t have the best track record. CEOs are claiming they saw the future in completely dark factories. That‘s not the best source. They‘re known to be compulsive liars and often detached from reality. Who knows what they saw or if they really saw anything.

Remember when unions and everyone were fighting against automation. What are you shocked at here?

The North American right and left both have become extreme Luddites over the past decade. What result did we expect? Lots of people said decades ago that we'd be left in the dust.

AI is the next field that we're doing the same thing on. The general population keeps getting influenced to hobble itself on new innovations and then we're shocked we're getting surpassed as these innovations continue to develop in other countries?

A lot of that is true, but I’m not sure it’s a major driver in the state of affairs in China vs USA.
Most of it is that we moved our manufacturing there, and they learned everything we knew and innovated on and about 15-20 years ago were basically like “ok, we’ve got it from here”
Meanwhile we keep acting like they’re stuck where they were in 1960. Even the press writes about them that way. Remember “China’s Ghost Cities”? “Who’s supposed to live there?” Well, now they’re mostly filled. The people who we gave the jobs to live there.