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Real shit has already started. I find the notion that this is the local peak and we'll have some respite unreasonably optimistic. There is, in principle, no reason for the war to not escalate into seven-figure casualties range, global economic issues not to deepen into a new Great Depression (related, h/t @sciuru), the war over Taiwan and subsequent Chinese and Russian collapses not to begin in, like, Q2 2023, then we get first serious AI incidents and global censorship/compute regulation regime, nuclear exchange by 2024, famines by 2025, supervirus plague (many variants currently in development) and what have you – up to and including NGO/Messiah/Basilisk coming. Garbage time is running out, like Nick Land warned us but we didn't listen. «Nothing ever happens» is sooo 2015.
Now as for your analysis, China has its own set of insurmountable structural problems, self-inflicted but at the same time exploited by the US: food dependence (yes, they won't starve outright the moment Malacca is blockaded, but no, they are actually not food-secure, they need to import that livestock feed, fertilizers and everything else and will not be able to pivot to rationing in emergency), chip/tech dependence that'll very painfully restrict their long-term ability to attack Taiwan with its accelerating militarization, collapsing real estate bubble, terrible ecology and soil health, brain drain, spiking dependency ratio plus failing soon at the automation cope (because, again, no chips), being boxed in by American allies, and plain degenerating governance that has unironically fallen in some respects to the lows of Mao era (and none of those problems will be solved by the planned assault on Taiwan). Iran suffers from similar woes (oh look) – and so does every other anti-America country.
There really is no trade-off between helping Ukraine crush Russian imperial ambitions and choking China (or defending Taiwan, or encouraging a revolution in Tehran), and expanding influence in the EU; those efforts load, and load only modestly, completely different non-interchangeable sectors of American economy and state capacity, and accordingly there is no advantage to China from Russia getting into this mess in the form of American weakening. Other modes are also dubious. Resource colony? No, there's no significant advantage here aside from the ability to demand discounts; Russia is already near-maximally dependent on China, and is unable to deliver as much as they need and more than is already delivered. We still don't have a reliable transport route, the «silk road» goes through Kazakhstan which is rapidly losing respect for Russia and drifting out of its sphere of influence; pipelines are fragile, as we've learned recently; construction of new connections has been criminally slow etc. In non-essential trade like fish and other foodstuff, China has been sabotaging trade on the pretext of COVID. Of course Russia has primed the world for blanket sanctions against aggressors. Plus a lot of previous gen Chinese military technology is derived from Russian/Soviet models, so now the free world is getting free training in destroying it. In general, getting your ally diminished is not any sort of 4D strategy (though I would't put it past them to grossly miscalculate). The list of demerits goes on.
But none of this matters in the grand scheme of things. What matters is that Russia and China are in terminal decline because they cannot retain talented people, and the point of no return has been passed some substantial time ago. I am always appalled by economic/political analysis which ignores this and focuses on some nonsense like GDP growth or even trade surplus. Who cares? If you don't have talent you cannot compete; worse yet, you have to allow talentless people to climb hierarchies of competence and power (if only to maintain short-term order and production pace), and they reinforce the culture of underhanded competition that closes off the hierarchy to remaining talent, which accelerates its flight or just rots on the bottom of the society; in the end you have a police state with serfs, and that's less than nothing in our era. Both countries are like men with fatal illness (or gradual blood loss); at times they grasp for panaceas, at times they feel mad rage, and at times they feel better and get complacent, but it already does not matter because the bottom line has been written long ago.
An appropriate Galkovsky quote from 1989:
True to form, he wrote «Jews» and «Anti-Semitism» instead of «Americans» etc. in the original. But this replacement probably only makes things better, and does not change the point.
What does this part mean? What kind of serious AI incidents could occur? What would "global censorship" even look like- if something was censored globally, no one would know about it. Or if people knew about it, it wouldn't be a global censorship.
Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing; relevant text from 2012
(...)
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Whatever really. Someone using Protein Diffusion 3 to develop a novel prion disease; or releasing a self-learning Twitter chatbot that drives people to suicide using sentiment analysis tools and some large language model. Or more boringly and plausible, a Stable Video Diffusion finetune for generating photorealistic CP with gore. What matters is the ability of the press to present it as an instance of an existential threat.
What does this change for my hypothesis?
But also, this is silly. I am speaking of the near future. Censorship can be and usually is official, people know that censors exist and know in some detail what sort of stuff they are looking for. I do not mean comprehensive concealment of some news, but e.g. demonstrative crackdowns on people sharing links to leaked models, and strict legal enforcement of closed-source development; oversight of ML development efforts by some busybody organization or (supra)governmental agency.
Basically I mean the bioweapon risk response post-COVID, but more competent and aimed at AI.
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This is bullshit. Whoever wrote this does not know France at all. Sure, we are closer to America now. Sure, we look less like 18th century France. But does America look like 18th century America? This argument is shitty. Modern France does not look like 18th century France because we have cars, planes, trains and computers. Nothing to do with America by itself.
The relationship to the economy and to the culture is not at all the same in France and in the US. It's not that French people oppose freedom to own weapons, it's that they do not even understand why anyone would not oppose it.
Currently, there is a strike in refineries that would have created an oil shortage if the government did not react by using strategical reserves. Can you imagine that in the US?
There is a national ban of headscarves (or actually any kind of religious or political symbols) at public schools in France. Can you imagine that in the US?
In the last presidential election, we got an actual socialist at 22% (the guy is anti NATO and thinks Taiwan should belong to the US). Macron got 28% and Le Pen 23%. Can you imagine that in the US?
Healthcare and retirement schemes are state-controlled. Can you imagine that in the US?
The only one of your four things hard to imagine in the US is the national ban on religious symbols at public schools. Healthcare and retirement are already heavily state controlled. Strikes happen in the US too, though far less often than in France. And while our system tends to whittle presidential elections down to two serious candidates, we did have Bernie Sanders (an actual socialist) in the primaries in 2016.
Bernie Sanders politics would be center right in France. There is a french guy I know that was supporting Bernie Sanders in the US and François Fillon (the mainstream right wing candidate in 2017) in France...
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To be clear, he says «the brain is Jewish» etc., I have changed it for Americans to reflect the contemporary cultural hegemony of the US.
Those features you list are, in my opinion, insignificant. France is one of the more unique polities on Earth, Americans may have homeschooling and you are compelled to ingest state indoctrination starting at 3 years of age, but what is learned is essentially the same.
What do you mean essentially the same? Obviously we learn that 2+2=4, do you think it means that it is the same as american culture? I doubt Americans spend as much time on grammar (and especially on french grammar) in the US. The language is not the same. It's not a detail: the book we read in class are not the same, they are from french literature. Do Americans ever read l'Avare, from Molière? Almost every french person has read it. Do most Americans ever hear about Racine and Corneille, about Flaubert and his master work, Madame Bovary? We learn at least two foreign languages, so that I can understand something like 50% of an article written in german, and like 95% of anything written in english (yet foreign language learning is not that good in France when compared to other european countries). Do Americans learn foreign languages? In history lessons, there is much emphasis on the french Revolution, but we almost never speak about the American revolution. Most french people do not even know there was an American revolution. Have Americans ever heard about Danton and Robespierre? About the differences between Jacobins and Girondins? There are also lessons on Napoleon, with much emphasis on his politics. Do Americans learn Napoleon's politics? So please tell me what is "essentially the same".
I've skimmed it in first grade. Soviets, like the pre-revolutionary elite, were fans of posh European literature and my house had a decent stack of that stuff. We could find other parallels, like the appreciation for High Modernism (some of Moscow architecture is in that style) or whatever.
Do you think that the Soviet Union was essentially similar to France on this account, if not others? I believe it was pretty much an alien civilization.
But there's a similarity, of course. It's the obsession with literature and formal school education as the fundamental frame of reference. Probably there are CCP stans too, who believe that learning Confucius is what makes Xi's PRC the heir to the ancient empire.
Not much to say here.
I still dont get to know what is important or not. I'm not sure anyway that the difference between XXth century France and Russia are were bigger than between XVIIIth century and XXIst century USA...
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I think you've kind of missed his point entirely; globalization occurs on distinctly American terms, and while France gets to have its own particulars as to certain things, there are matters of politics that exist within a particularly American frame. Now, since you are presumably French, you might contend this, but I think his point is that US cultural hegemony (propagated through US-based international business power and cultural power centers like Hollywood, Wall Street, etc.) will transform places like France and the UK to resemble America in everything but surface-level appearance (you might be familiar with this concept from a certain Rammstein song that someone linked somewhere in this mega-thread). A point that some posters here might make is that EU countries have thrown away traditional elements of their cultures in order to plug themselves into the international capitalism machine, a system that has strong roots in the US, thus giving power-brokers from within the private and public parts of the US incredible leverage over the internal workings of EU nations.
As a side note, I suspect you didn't learn about the American Revolution because it would have probably made your own revolution look like an absolute clusterfuck, but that is my own American cultural hegemony talking, so.
The problem with those claims is that they are non falsifiable. "Surface level" does not mean anything. I can prove that there is a huge difference and you can still claim it to be on surface level only. Actually your theory is really like marxism "anything non surface level can be explained by the class strugle". I am quite sure Marx would have loved your theory.
France, and a lot of other european countries, resist the american version of capitalism in some ways, and imitate it in other ways. If I say that all modern science is french because it uses the metric system excepted on a surface level, it is a ridiculous claim yet you can hardly disprove it as I did never explain what a surface level is. The french unions, the number of companies where the gouvernement has stocks (eg car companies, the train transportation company SNCF 100% state owned...), and the relationship of the people with the government are examples of things that are very different between french capitalism and american capitalism.
And hiding insults behind loosely related theories won't prove your point.
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GDP determines the quality of life that the country can offer to its cognitive elite; it is the country's equity retention package. From America's perspective, China has an alien culture and an alien language, and surely the difference is no narrower in the converse. Is China failing to retain its talented people? Do we have an objective measure of such, other than anecdotal impressions of more and more Chinese names showing up on Arxiv papers? It is a bigger country than America (4.25x), and a bigger proportion of its population comes from demographics that create cognitive elites than America's (~2x) -- so even low attrition should look conspicuous to us anecdotally.
Further, will its diaspora remain diasporized as China's GDP rises? Or will they RETVRN to a more comfortable environment when the economic differential is lessened, having absorbed the best of the West's tech? To what extent are they assimilating? I imagine assimilation requires at least a generation if not two or more -- glacial by the time scales we are considering here.
What I cannot dispute are (1) China's structural demographic challenges, although they smell to me like cope in view of the raw numerical advantages highlighted above, (2) China's governance failures, i.e. its tendency to step on its own dick every few years (most recently zero-covidianism & periodic destruction of its leading tech companies, etc. ... China is the country with the poorest Chinese people, as the saying goes), and (3) the adversarial might of the American empire which now appears to have resolved to engage in straightforward great power containment politics (although I don't know enough about semiconductors to contribute to the debate about how much or long US export controls will set China back). It's possible that China will fail, but it still doesn't seem preordained to me.
A lot depends on AGI timelines, as satisfying as it would be to have this debate solely on the basis of more readily extrapolable variables. I'm a bull on AGI timelines, having estimated the advent around 2025-2030 assuming continuation of current trends -- but that is a substantial assumption, it is not exogenous, and China is an intelligent and adaptive adversary. Destroying TSMC seems likely to set back the timing, plausibly by ten years or more, and China may act on that basis purely so America can't run out the clock.
I think it's more like GDP per capita. In the USSR and elsewhere during the Cold War, status was conferred by the state, such as being promoted to some lower-level government position or rank. I am not sure what incentives China is offering to retain its talent, but it's entirely likely also that many talented Chinese want to stay in China even if America offers more opportunity.
I think China will be fine though and this situation will not escalate.
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Does it now?
China doesn't have much to offer to its cognitive elite, or to any cognitive elite: their best and brightest live precarious, stressful lives of exhausted virgins, worse than the Chinese in the US tech schools do, and about the same as in other poorer Asian nations like India and Vietnam. And this happens precisely for the reason that there isn't a sufficient concentration of cognitive elite in Chinese government, thus they cannot internally propagate and execute bold moves to work around their pitiful $10K per capita GDP. All they have learned is to a) double down b) throw money in the general direction of the problem.
So many attractive proposals the US cannot match for ideological reasons were on the table, so easy to grasp with Chinese state power (even literally state-mandated catgirl gf, like they joke in Russia), 4chan retards could come up with them. But it's one thing to vaguely conceive of a policy and another to develop and deliver it; the latter requires American levels of collective intelligence.
I trust my eyes and my brain's ability to infer tendencies from anecdotes. And in fact anecdotes are more significant than any but the most sophisticated statistical metrics, because extreme seminal achievements that catch the eye and not averages drive technology and history. Nevertheless, even the conservative picture demonstrable by statistics is telling enough.
Many certainly would have returned already, if only it were more comfortable. A priori it shouldn't be hard to provide a more comfy environment for your people than a race 50000 years evolutionarily removed. But Xi provides something else.
Yes, that's a very interesting question.
I can't pedict the future. But I bet on them bungling it one way or another: either staying mad and falling behind, or lashing out to no lasting benefit. We'll see.
I don't want to project too much confidence here, but basically yes: higher GDP means the market addressable by Chinese startups is larger, which means those companies are more valuable, which means they can employ more cognitive elite under more attractive conditions (some combination of higher pay, better hours, nicer amenities and better career growth prospects). This discussion has gone a little sideways: my thesis is that higher GDP will make China more attractive than the status quo to the cognitive elite, and your rejoinder seems to be that the status quo isn't attractive to the cognitive elite, but that really isn't a disagreement.
And if all else is equal -- pay, career growth opportunities, etc. are largely comparable -- then I'd expect such baseline comforts as being able to speak your native tongue, living closer to your family and having a social network with a common cultural background would make the difference. And given their advantage in population and in intra-population human capital, they should be able to close this gap. The fundamentals are on their side. IMO it really is just a question of how badly they fuck it up.
Very cool chart, and definitely satisfies my challenge. It's the most interesting thing I've seen today. Thank you!
Certainly a possibility. I hope you're right, for my own provincial interests, and for my preference in not seeing Xi Jinping Thought indelibly etched into the cosmos.
For the sake of fairness, Hsu challenges it here but I believe that's where my anecdotal impression of latest achievements settles the uncertainty.
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There are many small corrupt countries in the world. Italy, like 100% of them, does not have IC industry or ASML machines and cannot plausibly seek to acquire them for any reason that's not a transparent «resell to China/Russia». Likewise for individual components.
Respectfully, I still believe you do not realize what modern IC manufacturing entails. Maybe it's your economic mindset where sound investment can always get transmogrified into goods, one way or another, more or less efficiently, because every input is commodified to some extent. One can't just buy a single machine: you need a city-scale stack to begin getting into it, a hefty slice of the global industry. China could do something with just a stepper, could at least try to reverse engineer it (try again, although they've failed before); but not Italy and not Morocco or whatever. Americans believe (incorrectly, IMO) that Chinese IC progress is an issue of existential risk, and will (correctly) parse this deal as sanction evasion, and shoot it down with extreme prejudice, just like they have shot down direct sales.
I have looked into it and the Chinese were making some progress at developing domestic alternatives to the harder bits; e.g. I loved this idea of using a particle accelerator as the radiation source, in place of ASML-style dark magic with a powerful laser beam punching tin droplets (it had been deemed impractical in the past, but so had propulsion landing on Earth...) But as you can see, this is still on the purely academic level; and the Chinese wouldn't be wracking their heads about sci-fi designs if they could make do with a little more corruption. By 2035, perhaps...
The US is not motivated to give them time until 2035.
I am extremely curious as to why nobody bothers or at least has shown the capability to do it. Some madlad from 4chan has apparently burned a github zeroday for NovelAI anime-tiddies-producing model. Frustratingly, only entertainment slop and data of citizens and governments of Bad Countries is liberated by courageous grassroots hackers (e.g. Gosuslugi or this stuff); locked things stay locked when big boys are invested in keeping them under lock and key. Admittedly, current gen AI is either opensource or experimental and mostly useless (far as I can tell), but there's little hope this will change in a year or so, when general models with industrial applications drop.
At least now we can produce dark elf tiddies on demand, while we wait for the winter to come.
As for Galkovsky, maybe we can discuss the nuances of his beliefs about Jews some other time.
I thought China already had Loongson as a homegrown CPU. It already shipped as part of the Lemote PCs, for over a decade now. Not remotely competitive with Western/Taiwanese offerings but able to maybe browse the web and host a service or two. Are(/were?) these not built in China?
I haven't watched this space closely. But the Chinese have long had modest-to-respectable successes with 16-12nm process, and I believe they can mass produce something close to Intel's 10 by this point, with good yields even for GPU-class chips (I may be optimistic).
What is important here is that the entirety of Chinese IC industry, no matter the process, is under attack due to the citizenship angle, and it is not lost on those people that sanctions have escalated a few times already; even if you're «safe» for now due to working on some obsolete process, it's clearly much safer to continue your career in the US. Of course there are other angles which are similarly harmful in the short term, but they are logistical, and thus in principle can be overcome.
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I thought you were gonna make the point that connections matter just as much as raw money (speaking of Italy, supercars are perhaps a good example: AIUI, you need connections or a good reputation to be able to buy something like a Ferrari).
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I think a wrinkle in your hypothesis, something Dase was trying to say above, is that even this theft only happens because the US et. al. don't/didn't give enough of a shit. Five years ago, nobody would have batted an eye over claims of China stealing IP. In a near-future where China is positioned as the next Soviet Union, however, that might change, to the point where anti-espionage efforts could become downright McCarthy-esque.
I for one think that a serious pivot towards New Cold War politics could very likely starve out social issues of political oxygen, starting at the higher echelons of US politics, and then cascading back down the levels until things like immigration, woke politics, etc. lose their salience.
I think that a serious pivot New Cold War will give big boost to the social issues. As Russia and China position themselves against wokeness and LGBTQ, Western bloc will turn them to the max to show the fascist Russians and Chinese. Anyone standing against wokeness would be seen as Communists and Communist sympathizers were seen in the 1950's.
"You are not gay or transgender yet? Are you a real patriot? Are you Russian agent or Chinese spy?"
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