I should be for this, because this is how I make my living in the most literal sense.
But to be honest, I am dismayed with how the ecosystem works in the EU. Billions upon billions of funding for research, some of it good and (let's face it) a lot of it not so good. But either way, no commercialization will result out of all this fundamental research. Any commercialisable results will be spun into startups in the US and China decades before any EU entity follows their path. The many scientists trained with this funding; many of them will end up in the US, and maybe of them will end up in European companies, but not in any position that would make them use any of their acquired skills.
At a time when the EU economy is falling behind so evidently, I'm frustrated that we have these people in power proposing the same old paradigms that don't really benefit the continent.
That's a hint at the problem. We spend a lot of taxpayer money to train some of the best researchers and scientists in the world, only for them to work for US or Chinese companies boosting their economy instead, because they pay more than the European companies.
Just look at Nvidia, Huawei and Apple, they have an R&D centers next to every top university in Europe or next to every ARM/Nokia/Ericsson office.
The problem isn't the money spent on training/education, it's the lack of top economic opportunities/companies we have in a lot of parts of Europe resulting in our tax money boosting the economies of our economic adversaries, who are less risk averse and more hungry about innovation and monetization.
The lack of top economic opportunities/companies is not strictly a EU problem, it's a everyone except China/US problem. Japanese workers were earning 2x as much as American ones in 1990. Now they're earning less than half.
I think this comes down to USA/China being big countries with a huge and homogenous consumer and stock market. This allows to scale fast to a point where you can simply crush the competition. The other small countries are all protecting whatever they already have to not be completely crushed, which makes it even harder for them to scale.
For example I am working for a successful startup in Belgium. We have a hard time entering our neighbour's market because of existing players, protectionist policies and just how different things are there, and so is it for them. Maybe with a huge capital we could make it happen, but in the end everybody knows we'll all get crushed by an American company, so nobody really wants to invest.
This could be solved with more EU integration, and with less economical protectionism at the national level so that national champions can leave place to bigger European ones. But everyone is blaming EU regulation for this situation and we're moving in the exact opposite direction.
>This could be solved with more EU integration, and with less economical protectionism at the national level
Absolutely no chance, especially on how right wing and nationalistic the EU elections are swinging lately. We'll just see more national protectionism. That's the problem with the EU. It's not one country where all the resources are pooled, like the US or China, but an alliance of several fiefdoms where each of them wants to be king and won't hesitate to backstab the rest (see abusing veto rights) to gain a perceived advantage with populists back home at the expense of everyone else's monetary disadvantage. The constant political squabbling between members is bittern than tooling up and going to war like in the old days, but it's holding us back compared to US and China.
>For example I am working for a successful startup in Belgium.
Would you recommend moving to Belgium for a career in SW development as a non Speaker of Dutch or French? I'm not looking for a fancy big-tech career or to change the world or make insane wealth but just to work in a leisurely environment with no stress and enjoy life.
I'm not sure it is more leisurely than other countries, and the winters are hard due to lack of sunlight. OTOH Brussels is very international, english is perfectly fine for work and life. It is also quite a fun city if you like the vibe and make the effort to dig under the surface. Antwerp / Ghent are less international and speaking dutch would be more important.
Actually I don't like Brussels that much, too crowded, dirty and overpriced for me (sorry if I offended anyone). I liked Ghent and Antwerp far more when I visited, felt more chill and laid back, easier to get places by cycling and walking, while being cleaner and less rough.
Don't know the tech market or how the population feels about non-Dutch/French speaking local. I would of course try to learn the language and integrate but it will take me a while.
I agree that the problem is not entirely to be blamed on the respective governments. The lack of private investment is a fundamental part of the puzzle. I have been trying to figure out why private capital loves to take huge risks in the US but is so financially conservative in Europe and I am not yet satisfied with the answers I get.
Well for one, Europe is conservative because it's more into protecting the wealth of the old gentry, the old families who used to run the continent, rather than disrupting it to build new wealth for others, therefore is a lot more risk adverse and instead just rentseeks and monetizes what they have like tourism and valuable real estate .
And secondly, the US can afford to outspend Europe at VC funding since it's not spending actual earned money from taxes, blood sweat and tears, but "monopoly money" they could keep printing for free as they own the credit card for the world reserve currency.
> The many scientists trained with this funding; many of them will end up in the US, and maybe of them will end up in European companies, but not in any position that would make them use any of their acquired skills.
This is (my simplified version of) Zimbabwe's problem[0]. They heavily invested in education, which is fantastic, but there was no economy to absorb their talents into, so the educated youth left for South Africa and onwards.
As James Carville would say on this topic: "It's the economy, stupid."
While your comment on the bureaucracy of the EU is reasonable and realistic, the comment on the use (or lack of it) of most science has very little to do with Europe.
I've spent literal years implementing the newest natural language processing papers in practice and over 90% of them cannot be replicated or are replicable but the results are fabrications (generally statistical lies or other types of misrepresentation). The text of the paper is almost never in line with the actual numbers and the numbers are not in line with reality.
Perhaps ironically I did feel like I was right to leave the academic world. I wouldn't like to professionally wade through the intellectual equivalent of shit for decades on end. A few years were more than enough.
Did you publish any of it? Your work, as painful as it sounds, is very valuable.
While some papers do not replicate, more authors than ever release papers, code and models together.
Nowadays, conferences such as ECIR (European Conference on Information Retrieval) have reproducability tracks that seek such work, and reward your kind of efforts with getting a peer reviewed publication. The results are often not "can be" or "cannot be" replicated, but more nuanced, and often interactions with the original authors are needed as space in publications is limited.
On a related note, giving a paper to a Ph.D. student to replicate is a pretty good warm-up exercise to get started, specially when combined with writing a survey article on a field (so that the week has a balance between "reading and doing"!
My field is different, but as someone from the industry side that keeps up with our counterpart in academia....most of what is being published is worthless. It serves no purpose other than to inflate publishing statistics. It has a lot of relevant keywords, but nothing I can actually use in industry to solve the problem the paper reports to.
For example, there will be a paper on how to fix X and I'll get really excited, but then realize that the idea shows that the person fundamentally doesn't understand the field and then they'll apply some obscure algorithm that is vastly inferior to the state of the art 20 years ago on a tiny model and then claim success.
> At a time when the EU economy is falling behind so evidently
Keep in mind that a lot of the US' current growth comes from its huge budget deficit. Europe has gotten significantly better at the commercialization aspect of research, two out of the three covid vaccines came out of Europe.
Infrastructure in the US is crumbling, education is a disaster (esp. college costs - crippling), medical costs out of control, housing costs out of control ... It's amazing that there is at least some surface appearance of the economy being healthy, but it's really a sham.
> two out of the three covid vaccines came out of Europe
Moderna and Novavax Covid vaccines are entirely American. Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was researched in Germany, but productized by Pfizer which is an American company. AstraZeneca vaccine is from UK, so yes in Europe but not in EU. Janssen vaccine was developed in Netherlands and Belgium by Janssen Vaccines, which is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, again an American company.
Also, Trump's Operation Warp Speed gave $1.2 billion to AstraZeneca and $1 billion to Jansen, so America funded even European vaccine development more than Europe did.
What you said is all correct, but there are some positive steps as well, for example ELLIS: https://ellis.eu/
ELLIS is a great way to compete with the top US universities. Much more is needed, especially access to computing power, just as the CERN for AI proposal suggests.
But to be honest, I am dismayed with how the ecosystem works in the EU. Billions upon billions of funding for research, some of it good and (let's face it) a lot of it not so good. But either way, no commercialization will result out of all this fundamental research. Any commercialisable results will be spun into startups in the US and China decades before any EU entity follows their path. The many scientists trained with this funding; many of them will end up in the US, and maybe of them will end up in European companies, but not in any position that would make them use any of their acquired skills.
At a time when the EU economy is falling behind so evidently, I'm frustrated that we have these people in power proposing the same old paradigms that don't really benefit the continent.