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521 points hd4 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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hunglee2 ◴[] No.45643396[source]
The US attempt to slow down China's technological development succeeds on the basis of preventing China from directly following the same path, but may backfire in the sense it forces innovation by China in a different direction. The overall outcome for us all may be increase efficiency as a result of this forced innovation, especially if Chinese companies continue to open source their advances, so we may in the end have reason to thank the US for their civilisational gate keeping
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dlisboa ◴[] No.45643770[source]
History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.

In many senses there's hubris in the western* view of China accomplishments: most of what western companies have created has had significant contribution by Chinese scientists or manufacturing, without which those companies would have nothing. If you look at the names of AI researchers there's a strong pattern even if some are currently plying their trade in the west.

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* I hate the term "western" because some "westeners" use it to separated what they think are "civilized" from "uncivilized", hence for them LATAM is not "western" even though everything about LATAM countries is western.

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onlyrealcuzzo ◴[] No.45644087[source]
> History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.

It's worked for a very long time for aircraft.

China has been pushing to build its own aircraft for >23 years. It took 14 years for COMAC to get its first regional jet flying commercial flights on a Chinese airline, and 21 years to get a narrow-body plane flying a commercial flight on a Chinese airline.

If for no technical reasons and purely political, COMAC may still be decades away from being able to fly to most of the world.

Likewise, in ~5 years, China may be able to build Chips that are as good as Nvidia after Nvidia's 90% profit margin - i.e. they are 1/10th as good for the price - but since they can buy them for cost - they're they same price for performance and good enough.

If for purely political reasons, China may never be able to export these chips to most of the world - which limits their scale - which makes it harder to make them cost effective compared to Western chips.

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Yoric ◴[] No.45644658[source]
> If for purely political reasons, China may never be able to export these chips to most of the world - which limits their scale - which makes it harder to make them cost effective compared to Western chips.

Note that this happens at the same time the US is breaking up its own alliances, so as of this writing, there's no such thing as certainty about politics.

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ahmeneeroe-v2 ◴[] No.45646955[source]
>the same time the US is breaking up its own alliances

This isn't happening. The US is driving a harder bargain with our allies. No one serious thinks anyone is walking away from alliances with the US.

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1. Yoric ◴[] No.45648467{3}[source]
Are you sure?

I mean, the current administration has repeatedly threatened to invade militarily two of its allies. Also, it has repeatedly threatened to not honor military agreements with most others, and both the current president and vice-president have insulted the leaders of several allied countries to their face.

Oh, and if that weren't sufficient, the current admin has unilaterally broken all trade treaties (alongside most intellectual property treaties) it held with its commercial partners.

The EU is slow at it, but it's no accident that everybody is doing their best to move away from US tech and military dependencies.