I guess Japan caught depression.
Doc: “No wonder this circuit failed; it says ‘Made in Japan’.”
Marty: “What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.”What was the joke supposed to be here, that they had rapidly industrialised.
I think they had a poor reputation and then rapidly improved which led to their current reputation
They started out like China, making cheaper copies of Western tech. Then they started to innovate.
China is now on exactly the same path, and it’s well into the phase where they are innovating, but most people still refuse to acknowledge that.
Western tech had a massive head start.
When a country’s tech manufacturing is being developed it’s going to start by making what already exists because… it has to start somewhere.
It didn’t take long for Japanese cars to supersede American cars. China is now doing the same to both American and Japanese cars. Nissan nearly went out of business and is still in trouble. Tesla’s situation isn’t helped by how dislikable its founder is so its value is plumetting.
Most countries don’t know how to deal with the advent Chinese EVs so they’re just slapping massive tariffs on them and hoping they figure something out in the meantime.
It isn’t just going to stop at Japan and China though. Japan was subsidized by the US post WW2 and China built its manufacturing from the ground up. There are many other countries on that path which will lead to significant global competition. The West is going to have to keep its head up if it wants to remain competitive by the end of the century.
The leading Western nation responding to increased global competition with reactionary protectionism is a bad start. It’s squandering all of the soft power the US has cultivated post WW2 leaving a power vacuum for China and other influential nations on the ascension to capitalize on.
It’s also worth noting that, economically, it’s not surprising that the country with the most people would have the largest economy.
There’s nothing fundamentally different between the people of the US and China beyond the conditions they’re born in. Insofar as innovation is a product of economics, educational investment, opportunity for innovation and a random chance it happens, and economic strength is a product of innovation and raw work output, it follows that more people leads to more work output, and eventually to a larger, more innovative economy.
A disorganized China and some key innovation breakthroughs by the west last century gave a significant headstart, and some of Maos more unwise choices slowed their catch-up, but it’s not surprising that an organized country with five times the US population would surpass us in economics and innovation, to say nothing of being competitive.
Really? Isn’t it pretty obvious, I mean they make electric cars now.
Yeah but a lot of people still don’t realize that they make better electric cars now.
I genuinely think using generative AIs to do your job for you should be grounds for immediate termination under just cause.
Machines have no agency and can never be held responsible for anything, thus should never be put under professional responsibility.
I can’t wait for these models to colapse onto themselves.
Because AI software isn’t ground breaking and is actually useless
I use AI almost daily as a software engineer. I like it because I’m training to jump into infosec, and the job market is going to be amazing as all this exploitable AI code keeps hitting prod.
I had some use of it. It is really good at summing and organizing a bunch of text.
So good in fact that apple spawned a whole new category of memes making fun of how badly that works.
Yes AI has good uses, it made my job faster, I can now focus on more important things because I’m not wasting time with bullshit that AI can do in a seccond.
But you can’t say that on Lemmy, here it’s all useless, a scam and gave my dog AIDS.
A lot of people here on Lemmy keeps saying that AI is bad because it failed one task it wasn’t built for. Or because it can’t do everything. I don’t get it.
Name one category of tasks that you would feel confident it can perform with at least a 90% success rate.
Making up bullshit. It never failed me yet…
Translating text. I recently had to translate a bunch of architectural requirements into english. I honestly don’t know if deepl.com uses GenAI or what. But the job was pretty much copy and paste. Occasionally I had to change a word because the connotation was a bit off, and a few times it got confused with tangled, run-in input and I had to rephrase whole sentences. I’m a native speaker in both languages and I estimate it would have taken me at least three times as long.
Improve text that I have written. With improve I mean change the text accodring to the specifications in the prompt provided to the AI.
Here are a few more:
- Since ChatGPT has parsed most of the puplic internet, it can be useful when trying to find information about something that is very obscure - (for example settings for an old or not as used software), where my ordinary searches has failed me.
- In addition to the previous one, it can be good way to find better search terms.
- Write repeated text with slight variations that I could do myself but an AI can do instantly.
- Translate and XSD (XML specification) into another structure (for example classes when writing code).
- Create macros for World of Warcraft.
- Explain errors outputed buy some software (ties into the first two).
I am sure there are other usecases that I could not think of.
Is the money, time and energy spent to create a tool that can do this worth it? That is perhaps the question want to ask and perhaps your answer is no.
maybe go for a “its bad because of the return on investment” angle? for the amount of literal billions we have thrown at it, perhaps its ok to expect more. if you gave me a mere couple of billion, i’d make healthy lunches for school kids to foster education and health outcomes (2-4-1!)
How many billions (in today’s money) were spent on going to the moon? What about the billions poured into refining the internal combustion engine? The billions that have gone into making and running massive particle accelerators?
Technology is constantly advancing and we often don’t know where it’ll take us until we get there.
I haven’t spent billions on it, so it is not a bad ROI for me. Perhaps it is for those who has invested in creating OpenAI, LLama etc, I am not one of them.
Spending the same amount of money to create a better world would be ideal. But if the money was not spent on AI development does not mean that it would be spent on anything better. That is also a discussion about the money spent on AI and if it has been worth it (a discussion very much wroth having), it does not diminish the usefulness of AIs.
The US isn’t innovating jack shit.
The US just created a massively polarized and unequal society so that when a country creates a new brilliant researcher or innovation, an American company can buy them out.
Basically, the insane poverty and lack of government services that the average American experiences gives them enough cash to buy up innovative people, companies, and competitors.
Innovate people, companies, and competitors
And quickly turn them complacent. I work at a Japanese company, and the amount of times I see an amazing Japanese expat turn into a busybody is insane. We have crafted the perfect “fuck your idea just do your job” culture
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Also the post-WW2 world order heavily favours their economy.
Their allies buy their debt, and their weapons. They give access to theiir markets to US companies, and support US wars around the world. They invest in the US economy in an unbalanced way that favours the US economy.
And all of this was in exchange for US security.
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Y’all are so jaded
No, we just don’t mislabel foreign brain drain as American exceptionalism.
Hentai happened
Anon forgets the switch:console ideals crystalized
Maybe Japan is so advanced it already moved past the overhyped generative “AI” and that’s why we haven’t heard anything about it
They have no groundbreaking AI software
Neither does the US
Huh? What countries have more advanced AI than the US?
Tradition trumped innovation
Unfortunately their tradition also causes them to work their asses off to such a degree they have even less kids than other developed countries and their restrictive immigration policy prevents this problem from being at least softened a little bit. Whole villages are getting deserted, not because of local industries vanishing like in the US (mostly) but simply because there are no young people anymore causing the necessary infrastructure for kids and teenagers to vanish as well -> nobody moves there -> everything’s fucked.
Unfortunately they keep voting for conservative governments as well, so no necessary change ever happens.
If AI is the chief innovation in the US, then the US is massively fucked.
I’d much rather have a fancy shinkansen.
That’s a high speed train for the non-weebs
Arigathankyou
Gesundheit
No, AI is one of the chief innovations which is a huge money maker. Don’t forget the US still dominates the enterprise server market which is worth trillions. Processors and GPUs are still designed and some manufactured here. Innovation comes in all shapes and sizes, AI is just the latest buzz.
llms and image generators alone are a tech that will change the world
They will and are changing it, to be sure. Whether those changes are positive remains to be seen.
You seem to be implying an argument based on Modus tollens:
- If AI is the chief US innovation, then the US is massively fucked.
- The US is not massively fucked.
- Ergo, AI is not the chief US innovation.
Well I disagree with the premise 2:
The US is massively fucked.
With that, no conclusion can be gained from premise 1.
I’m implying nothing. Some things are meant to be tongue-in-cheek.
Because Japan has become conservative in everything it seems, including technology…
Nintendo Switch 2 will be released this year
Nintendo comes out with pretty innovative gameplay.
Japan is living in the year 2000, since 50 years.
what does that even mean?
I think it means that they were ahead of the curve prior to the year 2000, which is when they started to fall behind the curve.
Not going to comment on the accuracy, but it makes sense to me.
I actually find this interesting, part of me wonders if there technological advancement meant they didn’t need to make changes/innovation, which led to others having issues having to innovate beyond what Japan did.
Hence why they are still stuck in 2000s
Looking back, I think we can say that the year 2000 was a much better time than 2025
Are they still using fax?
There are some things where fax still makes sense. Maybe I’m old, but I’m not a fan of “digital signatures” and “digital seals” for professional licenses. In cases where a document needs to be signed and/or sealed, I would much prefer a fax to a PDF with a “digital seal”. But that’s just me and I’m a weird dude.
Edit: Turns out fax is insecure. Did not know this but it makes sense.
Modern PDF signing creates a digital fingerprint showing the device it was used on, whose credentials were used, a timestamp, and even a location if location services are turned on.
But yea, I guess all that just can’t compete with the ironclad security of a fucking ink pen. Oh, sorry. A copy of an ink pen. So much more secure and traceable.
There are some things where fax still makes sense
Nope.
Fax is insecure, you’d be better off signing w/o a “digital seal” or whatever and emailing it in. You can also print, sign, scan, and send, just like w/ a fax, but send as a PDF instead of insecurely over the telephone wires. I’ve done both digital signatures and scanned regular signatures, both work and are better than fax.
I don’t use fax… I was not aware that it was insecure but I guess that makes sense.
Largest market for fax machines…
and floppy discs
Not true. Their goverment stopped requiring floppy disks… *checks notes* …last year!
im sure its still the biggest market.
On God.
Sadly Japan may be a culture in decline.
Their culture is basically work yourself to the bone even more than the US. Young people study their ass off and get a job working long hours while still living at home because they still can’t afford their own place. And you have stuff like if the subway is a minute late they hand out apology slips to workers so they don’t get in trouble with their bosses for being 30 seconds late. Meanwhile there is a very strong ‘defer to elder authority’ note in their culture. And in many industries people are expected to work a 10-hour day and then go drinking with the bus until 2:00 a.m. only to be back at work the next day at 8:00 a.m.
The end result is young people have neither the time nor the money to have kids. So they don’t.Their population is literally aging and shrinking. They are facing a very serious problem in wondering who is going to take care of their elderly. Their birth to death ratio is 0.44, meaning that for every baby born in a year more than two people die. In a nation of about 125 million, the population is shrinking by just under a million every year. That’s not good.
And while the Japanese people are highly educated and very capable, the ‘defer to authority’ culture prevents the sort of entrepreneurship you see in the US. An example of this, Japanese companies have a stamp called the hanko, when a paper memo is circulated around the office each employee stamps it with their personal hanko stamp to signify that they have read it. Many Japanese companies stayed in person during COVID simply because there was no digital equivalent to the hanko and managers refused to give it up.
If you wants an example, look at Toyota Motors. It’s been obvious to everyone with eyes that electric vehicles are the future, and it has been obvious for probably 8 or 10 years. Every major automaker is investing in EV technology. Except Toyota, which up until recently was still betting the farm on hybrids and hydrogen. But that’s because the good Mr Toyoda didn’t like EVs, and unlike in an American company no one would dare challenge him on that.
It is really too bad. Japan is a wonderful place with an amazing culture and rich history. But if they are going to survive they need to make very serious changes to their society and they need to do it soon. That is going to involve dumping most of what currently qualifies as Japanese business culture, an instituting some real work-life balance laws with teeth. I don’t know if they’re going to do it.
Sound like they have to drop capitalism like everyone else
The problem isn’t capitalism. US has always had capitalism and once we put good protections in it worked great, like post WWII up until like 1990ish. That golden arrow was mainly because there were strong protections for workers that were relevant to the time. A man working minimum wage could live decently and feed his family.
The three factors of production are land, labor, and capital. All three are supposed to have equal seats at the table. But starting somewhere between the Reagan years and 1990s, we started to let capital run the table. Labor took a back seat. And what we have now is the result.
Housing and health care became investments rather than services. Minimum wage didn’t track inflation, didn’t track CPI, and sure as hell didn’t track worker productivity. The federal minimum wage has less buying power today than at any point since the minimum wage was implemented. And there is a very real trickle down effect, in that if the lowest worker is making $7.25, all other wages adjust based on that. IE, the slightly higher end worker makes $15 or $20 because that’s double or triple the minimum wage. If the lowest worker was making $20, the slightly higher end worker would be making $40 or $60.
The result is that the American people have less buying power at their disposal than they have in a very long time. Significantly less than during those golden years of the latter 1900s. And that is why shit sucks.
Capitalism is not the problem. Unchecked unregulated capitalism is the problem. Regulatory capture is part of that problem. And that’s what we have now in many industries.
Fix that, raise the minimum wage, and stop letting corporations exploit not just workers but the nation as a whole. Then you have some capitalism that works for everybody.
This is a good summary, but I think it misses another big point. The country is super racist. They don’t allow enough immigration to offset demographic issues. They also don’t get any other benefits of immigration like cultural changes that could actually help companies be more adaptable, or maybe trying something different than the exact same thing for 100 years is a good idea.
I had sex with a Japanese girl once. Not relevant, I just like telling people.
The most fascinating thing about their extreme “defer to authority” attitute, is the appearance of the “angry american” phenomenon, which is just a japanese-speaking white dude employee, which is literally there to voice the staff grievances and suggestions to the boss, without anyone japanese having to lose face. Literally the reinvention of the court jester in modern times!
Wait, they got a job where you’re supposed to be professionally angry?
I gotta go to Japan asap.
