The Next Global Superpowers Are Racing for Future World Domination

when you think about the world's superpowers you probably think of countries like the United States and 

China and that's for a good reason as these are currently the two largest and most important economies in the world but that might not be for much longer because over the last five years a handful of lesser-known  countries have quietly been working on some world-changing projects in the background that could catapult them to being the top economic superpower of the world in the next few decades during the 1700s the two largest economies in the world were that of China and India in fact over half of the world economic output during that time came from these two countries and this was largely because the world economy at the time was still largely based around  agriculture and raw resources which China and India were the dominant world players in but then something changed you see as China and India continued to focus upon their wealthy agricultural economy a small island country called great Britain was innovating and trying to create new technologies that could help the country prosper not just for the next few years but for the next century to come so for example China and India were the largest cotton manufacturers in the world in the 1700s but after great Britain invented machine-powered textile factories  the productivity of one textile worker in great Britain became 500 times greater than a worker in China or India essentially this one innovation in great Britain Ade a large portion of China and India's economy obsolete overnight and great Britain's innovation didn't stop there they also invented the steam engine in the 1700s  which was revolutionary for increasing productivity building an advanced military and helping invent new advanced machines great Britain also invented many other things during this time such as a significantly more efficient way to make metals machine tools large-scale chemical production and yes even very advanced agricultural tools essentially great Britain had used technological innovation to become the world's one true superpower by the 1800s and because of their advances in technology during this time great Britain was pretty much able to do whatever they wanted on the world stage as their military technology was so advanced that they ended up conquering  many regions around the world on way to becoming the largest empire in history now the industrial revolution was the largest reason why great Britain was able to build the largest empire the world had ever seen but to the surprise of many that was not the only industrial revolution that would knock off the world's top superpowers from their throne  you see there have been multiple industrial revolutions the first industrial revolution was known for producing steam power and small machine tools but a second industrial revolution occurred between 1870  and 1914 and during this time the united states began rapidly adopting new technologies such as electricity railroads the telegraph telephone mass production of steel petroleum the combustion engine and much more and because the united states adopted these technologies first they had an early surge in productivity and surpassed great Britain as the world's top economic superpower in fact by 1900 the western world had  become so much more technologically advanced than the rest of the world that much smaller countries like Germany and France had reached the same economic levels as the superpowers from 100 years earlier which were China and India so the winner of the second industrial revolution was America because they adopted to the newest technologies first but soon after the second industrial revolution came the third industrial revolution and this was the period in the 20th century where we saw the invention of computers software automobiles nuclear technology and electronics and as you might have guessed for the most part the united states Japan and the soviet union were the three countries that adopted these new technologies the fastest and made them the global superpowers for  much of the 20th century and so that brings us to the moment we are living in today whether you know it or not we are currently going through the fourth industrial revolution and based on the previous history of the last several industrial revolutions whatever country invents and adopts the newest and most powerful technologies first will likely be able to be a superpower of the world for the next 50 to 100 years and that's why many countries around the  world know the stakes are just as high for this industrial revolution as they were for the last ones you see one common trend that we have seen through each one of these industrial revolutions is that whatever country adopts a technology that dramatically increases productivity first will end up becoming a superpower so what technology will be the most vital to economies around the world for the next  50 years well almost every country around the world agrees that it is a technology that some people are embracing in their daily lives today while others are becoming ever more fearful of it every day in 1952 a computer scientist named sandy Douglas built one of the first known computer games in his game which he called oxo he programmed the game in a way where the computer had a loss rate of zero percent meaning that if a human were to have played this game on the computer which was essentially tic-tac-toe the human player could never win even if the human player played a perfect game and this was arguably the first time in history where a computer was able to perform a multi-variable game better than any human ever could and this trend of computers getting better at games would continue for the next several decades i mean in 1988 computers became unbeatable in connect four by 1997 IBM's deep blue beat the world champion Gary Kasparov in a game of chess and in 2016 Google's deep mind beat world champion go player lee Sedol in a best of 5 series a task that many thought was impossible for a computer to do at the time now even though these were some of the most popular milestones in ai that many of you have probably heard of it is important to note that as the world focused on these large events of an ai playing against humans in games there were even more important airs being developed with larger real world impacts and that is why the fourth industrial revolution is heavily tied to an event that is currently going on that is called the artificial intelligence arms race you see as most of the public focuses on the novelty of aid and its applications governments and corporations around the world have quietly been gearing up for the next economic and militaristic battle for world domination through artificial intelligence so let's start off with the current leaders in aid who are the united states and china in 2014 the united states former secretary of defense said that artificial intelligence will define the next generation of warfare and that is why the united states government has been investing roughly eight billion dollars per year into aid research and technology one of the biggest projects is a project called sea hunter which is a fully functional American warship that is currently in its final stages of testing before becoming an official part of the us navy and the benefits of having an aid run warship are pretty substantial in regards to the navy's budget that's because a typical warship that is full of crew members typically costs about seven hundred thousand dollars per day in order to maintain but the sea hunter aid warship costs only fifteen thousand dollars per day making it ninety-eight percent more efficient than a human warship now the united states biggest advantage probably isn't actually from government-run aid research though in my opinion the biggest advantage is silicon valley you see even though the us government is investing billions of dollars per year into aid innovation the u's private sector is dramatically outpacing the entire us government in regards to aid innovation i mean when you just think about all of the aid milestones in history most of them have come from u's private companies or American universities whether it's google IBM amazon met tesla or SpaceX private companies and universities might actually be the use's biggest advantage to maintaining its dominance as the world's biggest superpower and we will come back to some of the economic implications of this in just a minute but the next biggest contender in the aid arms race is China xi jinxing said in 2019 that aid technology is critical to the future of global military and economic power competition that is why China has become a hot spot for aid investment over the last five years in 2017 nearly half of the world's aid startup investments went to Chinese companies the Chinese government also announced a two billion dollar aid incubator and Chinese companies have filed five times as many aid patents as American companies now saying all of this China may not even be the biggest threat to the united states aid supremacy the united kingdom for example actually has the fastest growing aid sector in the world Canada has a handful of world-leading aid companies like blue dot and element aid Singapore was rated the number one best country in regards to its aid implementation into its own economy south Korea has the highest aid investment per capita of anywhere in the world Japan has several top aid robotics companies in the world Russia will soon have 30 of its military be run by aid enabled robotics and Germany and France are producing more computer science math and engineering graduates per capita than anywhere else in the world all this means is that many major countries around the world have realized the importance of aid and automation in regards to the future global economy and military now as you can imagine we all know the militaristic implications of aid and how the country with the best aid and robotics will likely have the best future military whether it's an aid run navy air force or infantry there will likely be a scenario in the next 30 years that at least one military power will have a large portion of their military be run by aid and if that were to be the case they could theoretically dwarf the military capabilities of any other country in the world but in the immediate future the biggest implications of the aid arms race will likely come from the economics of aid you see as every year passes aid gets a little more sophisticated and more jobs get automated away in fact one study showed that from the year 2000 up until 2018 1.7 million manufacturing jobs were lost due to aid and automation and another study from McKinney showed that up to 20 million more manufacturing jobs could be replaced by aid and automation by 2030. now from a corporate perspective this kind of makes sense the corporations and countries that adopt aid will have an increase inefficiency that has not been seen since the last industrial revolution this is because machines are typically between one hundred percent and one thousand percent more efficient than humans in the manufacturing space you also don't have to pay machines a wage and machines won't come with any other economic efficiencies such as sick days an eight hour work day vacation time or a five day work week and what this all means for a country or corporation that adopts automation in the manufacturing sector first is two things one of which is that they can make goods for much lesser cost than anywhere else in the world i mean one day in the next decade there might be a near zero labor cost to manufacturing certain items with aid and therefore whoever makes the goods for the cheapest using ai instead of humans will have a significant competitive advantage and will likely be able to become the next manufacturing hub of the world but it's also worth mentioning that it also means that for that very same country they will likely experience an increase to their unemployment rate as its manufacturing jobs get automated away now for those that are curious the countries that are adopting automation the quickest within the manufacturing sector are in order south Korea Singapore Germany and Japan and what's also interesting is that Japan Germany and south Korea are already third fourth and fifth respectively in regards to being the largest manufacturing countries in the\ world and the only two countries that are bigger manufacturers in the world are China and the united states so the fact that those three smaller countries are automating at a rate that is much higher than China and the united states might mean that they could potentially catch up to and surpass those countries as the top manufacturing nation in the world in the next decade or two but this is also assuming that ai and automation keeps innovating at the same rate that it is today and if it does it'll give those smaller countries a bigger competitive advantage so in a sense right now south Korea Germany and Japan are the countries that are the closest to adopting a 100 ani run manufacturing sector which means that one of them could become the front runner for becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the world at some point in the 21st century but the manufacturing sector might not be the hardest economic sector that gets hit in this race for ai supremacy what do you think is the most common job in America is it a cashier maybe a farmer how about a construction worker well it is actually a driver when you take into account the millions of truck drivers ride share drivers and delivery drivers driving is actually the most common job in the country but since 2004 driving with artificial intelligence has come a long way we are now at a point where ai is sophisticated enough where a self-driving tesla is on average nine times safer than a human driver under average weather conditions all this means is that once regulations for autonomous driving are passed around the world whatever country adopts full autonomous driving first will likely have the most efficient and safe transportation sector on the planet if a country were to have the most efficient transportation sector on the planet it would help drop the country's prices of virtually everything like the transportation of oil food packages and virtually anything else that relies upon trucks trains cars or even ships so when that happens that country will likely have a major price and productivity advantage over every other country on the planet therefore giving them a major advantage in the global economy now these are just some of the dozens of immediate threats to the global economy i mean millions of retail jobs cashiers financial service jobs and many other jobs have already begun being automated away in the last five years alone so to this point we have largely been talking about the current and near future of implications that ai will bring to the world going forward but what will the far future look like in 25 to 50 years well some say that there will be a lot of new jobs that will be available that haven't been invented yet and i mean we have seen that trend through the previous industrial revolutions in fact one study showed that one third of all current jobs in America were jobs that didn't even exist 30 years ago i mean think about it in 1990 jobs like web developers social media related jobs app developers and a ton of other technical and consultation jobs were not even invented yet but today many of them are amongst the top 100 common jobs in the world now others say at the same time that the creation of new jobs might not happen this time around cause some say that ai and robotics will become so sophisticated that it could surpass humans in virtually every non-physical occupation by 2050 meaning that within 30 years there might be more automated jobs in the world than human jobs and that brings up a whole different debate about what should a future economy look like should governments allow for ai to take over the economy would a policy like universal basic income become a necessity and what happens to the few corporations that own the ai technology do a few dozen companies monopolize the entire world or more importantly what happens if ai becomes better than humans at virtually everything there are a lot of important questions that will come along as ai becomes more advanced and automation becomes more apparent into our lives i mean if you just think about how much ai runs your life today compared to 15 years ago you will realize why countries around the world think it is so important to invest in this new technology i mean you walk around all day with a talking artificial intelligence in your pocket everything you search for online is filtered based on an algorithm that a company like google finds suitable to you buy an item online a lot of your search results marketing sales processes and some of the delivery processes are actually being done by ai right now you might be driving a car that has self-driving ai you play games and use apps that are becoming smarter every single day and there are a ton of other examples just like this that are signaling to countries and corporations that artificial intelligence will become a much bigger player in the daily lives of individuals in the years to come but all in all one thing remains true countries around the world are preparing to have their economies and militaries be run based around ai and automation and whichever country develops the best ai that is either utilized economically or militaristically then that country will likely become the world's new superpower and the winner of the fourth industrial revolution now. if you're interested in seeing more Bloggs like this please like and comment for my appreciation.