(ModernDiplomacy.eu) While the USA is still talking about a technological revolution, China reports another success in quantum computing and AI: “China claims quantum computing lead with Jiuzhang photon test, creating machine ‘one trillion times faster’ than next best supercomputer”.
The times are over to claim that China could only copy technology from the West and would get all its successes from economic espionage. Graham Allison once said that China is not doing Research and Development (R&D), but RDT (Research &Development &Theft). While this is correct, one should not forget that not only China harmed intellectual property rights, copied technologies and had economic espionage—the West and the USA are also doing this. Scholars and knowledgeable people of economic history know that these are not new symptoms of the last decade. Just a look at the history of the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project, how Russia and China got their nuclear technology.
While the Germans and Europeans are complaining that the USA and China would steal their technology, it should be clear that most technologies “stolen” become more and more outdated. Germany and Europe might come in the situation that they have to copy or steal from China or the USA just to get access to the new technologies. And without a military-industrial complex, joint venture capital, a Silicon Valley, or EU hi-tech funds, nothing will change.
This author calls for a European investment fund that promotes new industries and start-ups, as well as existing national champions nationally and European, but as a new EU Los Alamos and Apollo project. He envisions “A kind of Apollo project from cloud computing, quantum computing, AI, blockchain technology, robotics to nano and biotechnology and also such new developments as artificial meat.” New ecological technologies would have to be also addressed, which can already be part of the current New Green Deal of the EU.
A European Silk Road Marco Polo 2.0 would be needed, a project that in addition to the systematic development of a high-tech industry in research. Development and production also remove the investment backlog in the analog and digital infrastructure in Europe, which are also prerequisites for the use of these new technologies, leaving the young generation with a well-functioning infrastructure for the future as the legacy of our generation, a common interest project that unites today’s Europe, a vision and concrete material advantages,