Thread by @punk6529

1/ On the EU Giving Up

I watched a panel on AI (machine learning) at a conference hosted by the European Commission.

9 people on the panel

Everyone agreed that the USA was 100 miles ahead of EU in machine learning and China was 99 miles ahead except for those who believed...

2/ ...that China was 100 miles ahead of the EU and the USA 99 miles ahead.

In any case, everyone agreed that in the most important technology of the 21st century, the EU was not on the map.

The last person on the panel was an entrepreneur.

3/ He noted that the EU had as many AI startups as Israel (a country 1/50th the size) and, btw, two thirds of those were in London that was heading out the door due to Brexit.

So basically the EU had 1/3 the AI startups of Israel (this was a few years ago)

4/ So the panel discussion turned to "What should the EU do?"

And the more or less unanimous conclusion (except for the entrepreneur) was "We are going to build on the success of GDPR and aim to be the REGULATORY LEADER of machine learning"

I literally laughed out loud

5/ Being the "Regulatory Leader" is NOT A REAL THING.

Imagine it is the early 20th century and imagine that cars were invented and that the USA and China were producing a lot of cars.

The EU of today would say "Building cars looks hard, but we will be the leader in STOP SIGNs"

6/ This is defeatism, this is surrender, this is deciding to be a vassal state of the United States and China in the 21st century.

The EU is already a Web 2 vassal to the US tech companies (none of its own, so it has to try to limit their power)

7/ And it is a form of defeatism whose implications are just starting to show.

If the EU decided that it would not make cars in the early 20th century, the loss would not only be "no car manufacturers"

It would be loss of all types of industrial and manufacturing expertise

8/ There would be no Airbus, there would be no BMW, there would no German companies selling high precision equipment to Chinese manufacturers.

The fact that we can sit in a hip cafe in Barcelona and not break our backs in the fields like our ancestors...

9/ ...is because over the last 150 years, Europe industrialized and, in many areas, was the world leader.

German car manufacturing for example was, in many ways, a leader for a long time.

I think it goes without saying but I will say it.

10/ Industrial capacity is dual use. If you can make cars, you can make tanks.

If you can make self-driving cars, you can make self-flying drones.

And while maybe in the future we will have peace in our times, today the world is still a rough place

11/ If you want to protect European interests, yes, it is nice to project soft power and culture and values (I am all for it),

but

you also need to be able to defend your borders and your values and, even better, have enough of a deterrent capacity that nobody would dare...

12/ The basis for development and industrialization in the 21st century is one and only one thing

TECHNOLOGY

Machine learning, cryptoassets, robotics, biotech.

These technologies will raise the quality of life for citizens/civilians but also drive military strength

13/ The idea that Europe can concede the field in these areas to the USA and China and just be the referee saying "You can't do this" and "You can't do that" is a complete joke of a strategy.

Now this is not officially the strategy.

14/ Officially the EU is for all these things, but done under the careful guiding hand of Brussels.

It won't work that way. You can maybe build military aircraft in a centralized way, but tech fields are built on startups, startups need flexibility and startups are mobile.

15/ Given the wide range of actual and proposed restrictions on, say, machine learning and web 3, why would any startup that has a choice not try to launch instead in the United States?

And the best ones will find a way to do it.

And EU will be left with the less good ones.

16/ The EU already has some structural disadvantages in startups - smaller fragmented national markets without a common language, less flexible labor markets.

If you add on "here are a bunch of rules that your competitors across the Atlantic don't have", well, good luck to you

17/ "But not everything is about money 6529"

Sure, but this is not about money per se.

This is about industrial capacity, the ability to operate a modern productive society.

The social rights of Europeans, the social benefits are paid for by prior industrialization efforts

18/ If you want your kids and grandkids to also have that sweet sweet European life, well you, anon, and your elected officials, have to do the work like your grandparents did.

The world is a competitive place, there are no free lunches.

19/ The idea that the Europeans can rest on their laurels for 50 years while the Americans and Chinese do the work of digital industrialization...

and also expect that the Europeans will have the best lives in the end, well that is a fairy tale.

A bedtime story for children.

20/ I am of European heritage and currently live in Europe.

I can assure you it is perfectly possible to grill fresh fish and drink nice coffee and also not have dumb ideas about the future of technology.

You can do both. The EU should try to do both.

21/ Europeans are smart but often constrained.

America might do a lot of things wrong but the wide open space that it provides in its mythology is very powerful.

The EU should encourage its citizens to take more innovation risk, not less innovation risk.

22/ This thread is a bit off topic from the focus on decentralized crypto rails (as a counter to the centralizing force of machine learning), but it is related.

The EU's overly conservative position on Web 3 is a subset of its overly conservative position on all tech.

23/ The EU is the only other economy in the weight class of the United States and the only economic superpower that also believes deeply in constitutional democracy.

It is important that the EU comes along for Web 3 and for a rights based approach to digital architecture

24/ If this is your first time here, our goal is that the metaverse is built on open interoperable standards, not as one company's walled garden database.

More here:

https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1448399827054833668