It could be possible to maintain lower level of life comfort while keeping the "academic part" competitive, if the world outside USSR wouldn't demonstrate that a better life is possible. So, I think for some time USSR could maintain the lead, which it did, but then it wasn't enough.
China has tremendous advantage in number of people - 4x compared to USSR - and way better economical system, but disadvantage in scientific schools traditions (which it tries - up to a point - to improve) and similar problems with freedoms. Improving scientific level takes time and may lead to conflicts with societal limitations. China may have some years - or even decades - before such problems will become critical.
I'm not an expert in soviet history but I feel like their efforts around science and technology were economically unsustainable and almost all of them were directly or tangentially related to the military. I don't remember the soviets exporting consumer goods to the west.
Academic freedom isn't the only freedom that scientists and engineers care about.
I don't doubt that china can spend a ton of money, trap its engineers/scientists and use its media machine to try to keep its population focused on nationalism. I just think that if that didn't work for the Soviets it wont work for China. That said china's current system will probably work great right until it doesn't. Idk I'm just some person on a computer though....
Take this thread for example: "the culture that creates new tech is something that china can't steal and it can't replicate it without giving up authoritarian rule"
This truism that China "can't innovate" because they live under an authoritarian government is very commonly believed on HN, but it's nothing more than an opinion. However, if you were to suggest to these same people that China is a poor source for sourcing immigrants, because <some unique characteristic of China>, the logical parts of their brains would fire into action and point out how "wrong" that statement is, for obvious reasons.
A lot of people, including people on HN, passionately believe things that are absolutely contradictory, and they vote accordingly.
The GDR did.
Yes, we sent rockets to the moon, but an average Ivan couldn't have proper plumbing in his apartment.
Those great leaps were made in things without real life value.
P.R. China on other hand, can't be bothered with "prestige project." The only thing that can bother a government official here is money. And money undoubtedly have value in everyday life... unlike moon rovers.
Human welfare is always a priority that competes with 'national interests'.
One of the reasons that the United States won the race to the moon (while definitively losing the race to space and manned space flight) was because we were the first to dump exorbitant sums of money into the hot (and extremely expensive) new kid on the computing block: integrated circuits.
Before ICs, computer parts were often hand-welded, which NASA determined was too failure-prone to reliably control the lunar lander, as such a device had to be able to handle shaking, cosmic radiation, temperature shifts, extreme G-forces from liftoff, and so on. For that same reason, the Soviets were also unable to complete a reliable lunar lander before the Americans, regardless of their past successes with spaceflight.
NASA’s immense investment in integrated circuits greatly accelerated their adoption, and as a result, computers became much faster, and much cheaper, than ever before.
The history of computing goes straight through the Apollo 11 lunar lander, which does not get nearly as much credit as it deserves.
If it wasn't for integrated circuits, the u.s. likely would not have won the race. And it's not just because I'm a chip guy.
> Very excited to see what comes from that!
I am too :)
>once SBCs can handle heavy-duty machine learning
I think that day will come sooner than you think.
Older properties in London sometimes still had outhouses into the 1960s.
Imagine the dilemma: you are a nuclear physicist and Lenin says that atoms are indivisible. What do you do? (This really happened)
American engines of the same vintage probably would have been used if they were available for a similar price.