I think for the high-performance stuff, history will repeat itself like with China's silk production. The "silkworms" (today's silicon IP) will eventually become open and everyone will know how China did it.
China’s silk industry attempted to prevent replication by withholding information: in today’s lingo, that’s not patents, that’s trade secrets. Those are intentionally mutually exclusive: the motivation for patents was quite literally to prevent knowledge being kept secret and eventually lost by granting time-limited exclusivity in exchange for public disclosure. (That’s why you can’t get a patent for something that was previously published elsewhere, even if it was you publishing it.)
In theory, every patented technique is already public: it’s described by the text of the patent. In practice, today’s patents are malicious compliance writ large: most of the time, they describe only the most indispensable (not necessarily the most difficult) parts of the processes in the most obtuse language possible. And while I hold that a patent lawyer’s job is morally repugnant, the overall fault is hardly with those exploiting loopholes, it’s with those who cast the loopholes in stone (making them part of national law, pervasive international agreement bundles such as the WTO, etc.) in the first place.
