I find it amazing how quickly conventional wisdom about new technology can harden. It is commonly assumed today that 5G, the fifth generation mobile technology that has yet to become a large scale commercial reality, will be dominated by China.
Proponents argue that China is moving ahead quickly to build out the necessary infrastructure, while the US and particularly Europe lag behind. China’s homegrown telecoms company Huawei is busy making deals in multiple countries, while the US chip champion, Qualcomm, has been bogged down in a multiyear, multi-continent legal battle with Apple, which came to an end last week.
Finally, many believe that it will be easier for a surveillance state such as Beijing to own and harness the data that will be transferred via the 5G chips that will exist in all sorts of products from tires, to tennis shoes, to foetal heart monitors. The key idea behind this thinking is that we’ve left the “innovation” stage of artificial intelligence use, and the only thing that matters is the data.