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In all likelihood, it's a battle between the US and China as to who'll have more automated factories. Surprisingly, China is ahead of the US in robots per worker (and so hugely ahead overall) despite the US having a head start. China has a more aggressive attitude towards manufacturing and industrial efficiency than the US.
Maybe South Korea is a competitor, they're well ahead in the 'robots per industrial worker' index of everyone except Singapore. But can South Korea secure the input resources needed, given their declining demography? Robots need iron, chemicals, mines, logistics, scale, young people to innovate with them. There's probably a critical mass of market size, brainpower and resources you need before you can develop a world-class robotics industry like China or America. It would surprise me if a small country was able to leapfrog the big powers. Can South Korea supply everything it needs domestically, or even most things? Can they compete in 'let's throw 10 billion at this gigafactory/huge research project'? I don't think so.
I reckon technological advancement and capital development (robots and datacentres) stem from high population + a bunch of other things like organization, IQ, geography and so on.
I think Asia has a distinct advantage here simply because they culturally value education far more than most of normie Americans. We don’t push our kids that hard even compared to European states. We don’t worry too much about grades and achievement, in fact we are often destroying our education system in the name of student’s feelings, or racial disparities. A lot of schools no longer have “gifted” programs to develop potential minds. There are schools no longer pushing to get kids into algebra before high school. If we weren’t attracting our engineers from abroad, we’d be even farther behind because of how bad our K-12 system is compared to Europe let alone Asia.
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I agree, but I also expect automation technologies to diffuse quite fast, such that after a period of time economic progress will depend more on total resources available to a nation (perhaps surface area covered by a nation would a half decent proxy) instead of human-driven progress.
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