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Where by "Chinese" you mean the mainland nation, not the ethnicity, right? On the hardware side of ML the most innovative chips are all manufactured by one 95%-Han-Chinese island that everyone else is struggling to catch up to, and on the software side of ML there's hardly a shortage of Chinese names, even if they're mostly Chinese-American immigrants or aspiring immigrants or descendants of immigrants. (Or Chinese-Canadian? A quick sampling seems to show a lot of those.)
But there's an obvious reason why we might not expect that immigration to be critically important forever. Go back to the earliest of those papers, just a few decades ago, and China's GDP (PPP) per capita was a tenth of the USA's. If you were smart enough to navigate emigration and immigration while also becoming bilingual and intellectually useful, moving from China to America (or to Canada, America's Hat) made a lot of sense, and we got to cash in on that brain drain. Today the ratio is closing in on a third, which is still a pretty solid incentive, but there will be smart people on the margin who no longer think it's enough incentive to uproot their lives for, especially if they expect to be in the economic upper class either way. If the ratio keeps narrowing, it becomes a vicious (or from the PRC perspective, virtuous) cycle, as the marginal people who stay in China help to build the kind of economy that persuades an ever-wider margin of young people to stay in China.
I'd like to hope that Chinese Communist Party rule puts a permanent thumb on the scale in favor of the West, slowing that cycle, but today "communist" no longer means insane suicidal crusades against sparrows, whereas "capitalist" can mean a decade or more of political fighting just to teach 8th graders algebra or start building a new high-rise in Silicon Valley, and I'm not sure they're still as far apart in practice as they're supposed to be in spirit.
What young people? China has a TFR of around 1.2 if you trust the Chinese data, which you maybe shouldn't. If China is able to use the last gasp of their civilization to birth the machine god then perhaps they'll be on top but this is not a generational project.
Strange argument. That's still hundreds of millions more young people than in the US. They don't dissolve in the shadow of inverted population pyramid, they simply get to solve the problem of elderly care on top of having a productive economy to run.
And all this happens within one "generation" anyway.
As the bulge of population retires that elderly care problem becomes more difficult, the ratio of working aged people to dependents becomes much worse. That's before even factoring in burning the other end of the candle by trying to increase birthrates to something sustainable at the same time. If not solved you have a population that at best halves every generation and I suspect would actually spiral even further downwards.
Okay. I think the elderly care is mainly a problem of machine vision and manual dexterity. I believe these guys will solve it in five years tops.
As I said, if they raise up the machine god, or I guess this is just getting us past the need for physical labor, then they've won. But it's this generation in the next decade and not a generational project.
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That's not really what HBD advocates have in mind when they talk about "innovation" though.
There's a hierarchy of innovation/creativity with some advances being more fundamental than others. The Chinese may be great at manufacturing chips, but they didn't invent the computer itself. The dominance of Taiwan in chip manufacturing seems to be, again, yet another example of "the Chinese are great at executing and improving upon fundamental ideas that other people came up with", unless perhaps their designs and manufacturing process are reliant on substantial advances in fundamental physics that they came up with themselves (this could very well be the case and I'm just ignorant of the facts, please educate me if so).
Granted, the opportunity for ideas as fundamental as the computer (or even the transformer) don't just come along every day. They can only occur under the right historical conditions. But even accounting for that, the sustained European dominance in the area of such fundamental ideas has been striking, and deserves an explanation.
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