> It's not a great example though, because the US was the principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial country relatively unscathed by it.

The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in Artificial Intelligence.

If, like everyone is postulating, this has the same transformative impact to Robotics as it does to software, we're probably looking at prosperity that will make the 1950s look like table stakes.

Are you sure that in today's reality the fruits of the AI race will be harvested by "the people"?

> The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in Artificial Intelligence.

There is no early mover advantage in AI in the same way that there was in all the other industries. That's the one thing that AI proponents in general seem not to have clued in to.

What will happen is that it eventually drags everything down because it takes the value out of the bulk of the service and knowledge economies. So you'll get places that are 'ahead' in the disruption. But the bottom will fall out of the revenue streams, which is one of the reasons these companies are all completely panicked and are wrecking the products that they had to stuff AI in there in every way possible hoping that one of them will take.

Model training is only an edge in a world where free models do not exist, once those are 'good enough' good luck with your AI and your rapidly outdated hardware.

The typical investors horizon is short, but not that short.

Early on in the AI boom NVidia was highly valued as it was seen as the shovel-maker for research and development. It certainly was instrumental early on but now there are a few viable options for training hardware - and, to me at least, it's unclear whether training hardware is actually the critical infrastructure or if it will be something like power capacity (which the US is lagging behind significantly in), education, or even cooling efficiency.

I think it's extremely early to try and call who the principal winner will be especially with all the global shifts happening.