New research from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) shows that China is now leading the way in 57 out of the 64 technologies assessed by its Critical Technology Tracker, which has now been updated to cover the last 20 years.
The tracker measures a country’s performance based on the high-impact research it produces, specifically looking at the number of publications its institutions released in the top ten percent of cited papers in that specific field.
The data studied was from a range of fields, like AI, cyber, defense, and robotics.
Potential Monopolies
From 2003-2007, the US led in 60 out of the 64 categories, with China picking up three, and Japan the final category of distributed ledgers. Whereas now, the US only leads in small satellites, genetic engineering, quantum computing, vaccines and medical countermeasures, nuclear medicine and radiotherapy, and natural language processing.
Among the things monitored by the ASPI is the potential for monopoly control of a technology by a single nation. The institute identified 24 categories that are ‘high risk’, an increase from last year’s 14. China leads in all newly classified monopoly technologies, and all could be considered defense oriented, like drones, satellite navigation, and radar. The report adds,
“Given the extent to which strategic influence will be determined by technological primacy, even the US has demonstrated that it needs trusted partners in research, innovation and industry to maintain an edge over major competitors such as China.“
Elsewhere, India is becoming a bigger player, ranking in the top 5 for 45 fields. The EU comes second in 30 technologies across the board and when measured as a bloc, reduces the monopoly risk by increasing the share of the research produced. The UK has fallen out of the top 5 categories in 8 technologies since last year, now only high ranking in 36 fields overall.
Via The Register
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