World Has Entered Technological Race: Russian Top Official

The International RUSSIA EXPO opened its doors in Moscow on Saturday. The exhibition involves numerous events, including a marathon that allows citizens to personally interact with important Russian speakers, including top officials, scientists, athletes and politicians.
Sputnik
The world has entered a race, in which technology is becoming a factor of economic dominance, said First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Andrey Belousov on Sunday, at the International RUSSIA EXPO

"The world has entered a technological race, and it's not even the fact of the technological race itself, but the fact that the largest countries in the world, primarily the US, are trying to make technology a factor of economic dominance," Belousov said, speaking at the marathon.

According to him, this race is developing in three or four main areas. The first one is digitalization (artificial intelligence, quantum computing and a number of other areas), the second sphere is space research and the third one is the energy sector.

"[The second field] is space. This has been a very underestimated sphere, but literally in the next two or three years, we will see that the situation has changed dramatically. And why is that? Because space means the deployment of low orbit space [staellite] constellations [...] This is a completely new communiaction system," Belousov continued.

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He also touched upon the remote sensing of the Earth in real time, allowing to control production, transport, construction, and so on online via a satellite.
The technological race is also taking place in the fields of medicine and energy, and partly in the field of drones – both in the air and on land and water.

"Another trend in the global economy is the climate challenge and the energy transition. [The latter] is an attempt, a significant attempt, to establish the requirements of a green economy as a factor of competitiveness: to ban or significantly limit trade in products that are dirty from the point of view of energy transition, such as coal, oil, metals, fertilizers, chemical products, in order to consolidate their competitive advantages," he said.

Belousov outlined a number of other global trends. One of them is the emergence of new players in the global market, the so-called super-economies. He explained that these are countries that have the potential to gain economic and political sovereignty. They include India, Brazil, China, South Africa, Indonesia, Iran, Turkey and a number of others. Arab and major African countries are on their way.
During the event, the official commented on the difficulties in the US-China relationship; the crisis of the largest institutions of the global economy – the World Trade Organization (WTO), partly the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and others.