They have such a weird and outdated view of China, it's almost comical. It's like America's answer to everything bad coming to them is protectionism. They still think China is a third world country with a bunch of factories and polluting industries not able to do anything else other than manufacturing products for foreign companies
China played the smart long game and took advantage of America's ignorance and short-sighted thinking. They already "won" in the sense that they outmaneuvered the U.S. because they relied on flaws in human nature (specifically, greed). Their moves around AI are just more of the same clever behavior.
I don't agree with all of their means for getting here, but to accomplish what they have in ~30 or so years [1] should blow minds far more than it does in the West. And they did it by convincing us to give them control of our manufacturing and selling us (literal) boatloads of cheap junk. Historians will look back on this era as one of the greatest demonstrations of "winning without firing a single shot."
This whole insular POV is tired, ignorant, and frankly just another indicator that America has lost the plot, shit-faced on its own arrogance.
> The English translation of the book was then published by a previously unknown Panamanian publisher, with the subtitle "China's Master Plan to Destroy America" and a picture of the burning World Trade Center on the cover.
Hmm, sounds awfully sensationalist, designed to fan the flames of Sinophobia and thinly veiled racism.
China deliberately adopted western style market institutions. They joined the WTO. No, they aren't a fully westernized market, but they are closer to a competitive marketplace than the state dictating all of what will or will not be built.
I'm confused, what has America and the west lost the plot on? You would have preferred the west to exploit China more?
This framing of a zero sum game is counterproductive.
> This framing of a zero sum game is counterproductive.
I agree but that's not at all what I was getting at. Quite the opposite. The mistake America made, what made it vulnerable, was playing everything like a zero sum game. We're in the early days of that behavior coming to roost.
I think they're saying America ended up positioning itself as the loser because they framed things as a zero-sum game. Which of course is a generalization, neither America nor China is a monolith, but I can certainly see some presidencies of the last decades leaning more into this attitude than others.
“If you assume everyone only has hammers, you'll end up getting screwed”, or something like that.
> I think they're saying America ended up positioning itself as the loser because they framed things as a zero-sum game.
I didn't bother responding earlier, and I'm not sure why I'm responding now because I don't think "because they framed things as a zero-sum game." explains anything, and it sounds like something that sounded like a retort but offered without any evidence means nothing.
Just like how not everything is a zero-sum game, not everything is a debate where one side tries to "win" where every exchange is an aggressive retort trying to disprove the other's point. I was trying to clarify what I suspected the intent was.
If even the suggestion of considering different points of view feels like an attempt to disprove your own position, then that mainly says something about how you are approaching this exchange.
its the natural conclusion of raw unregulated capitalism. Without guiderails, we offshored all production (because it was cheaper), and we suffered a complete loss of manufacturing workforce. Now that Trump has gone full protectionist, we have nothing with which to manufacture from. It's beautifully ironic in a way, in that our greed will be our downfall.
Of course china isnt innocent in all of this. Their 996 work culture is inhuman, and basically indentured service. But, their government is able to leverage that workforce.
>we offshored all production (because it was cheaper),
And why was it cheaper? Shipping things from the literal other side of the world isn't free. Cultural and language barriers to efficient communication aren't free. Etc. etc.
Your first point is correct, but your second point doesn't follow. Lack of protectionism is based on the notion that the U.S. will always be technologically one step ahead of China because China can only copy. That's what has gotten us to where we are. Note that China itself is a protectionist economy. So in some sense protectionism is recognizing that China has a pretty good industrial policy and copying it.
> Note that China itself is a protectionist economy. So in some sense protectionism is recognizing that China has a pretty good industrial policy and copying it.
China's protectionism is emplaced to support long-term goals. Amodei's policy suggestion is explicitly in support of short term goals (1-5 years), a time window he claims to be "critical" without evidence. A cynic may link that window to forthcoming AI IPO's, and allowing current CEOs to secure ridiculous golden parachutes before leaving the mess of how to deal with the unpaced Chinese frontier models to their successors and future US legislature.
Letting AI companies set your foreign policy (voluntarily ceding global primacy to maximize domestic[1] profits) may have awful higher-order effects for the US. What's hilarious is the shameless about-face: for years, the same companies have been declaring that it is vital American AI innovation not be encumbered by new laws. Until the Chinese models glided to the frontier.
1. Maybe they hope to browbeat Europe too, like how they pushed out Huawei equipment from Euro telecoms. An alternative reading is that the loss of primacy is involuntary, so they may as well spin the reality, and salvage a win by colluding to eliminate better, open-weight models from the markets in "democracies" with the excuse that they are unpaced and therefore dangerous. What will predictibly happen is there will be `Qwen-8.1` for RoW, and a lobotomized `Qwen-8.1-paced` for Americans.
The alternative to protectionism is Chinese-style industrial policy. Which necessitates Chinese-style "we don't care if you're a billionaire, you will do as we say or men with guns will make you" levels of governmental control. Which I'm not sure any of us really want, as satisfying as it would to watch these CEOs get publicly re-educated.
They aren't patriotic and they don't really care about competing with China, they fancy themselves princes and are playing on the silents/boomers in charge being irreparably stuck in the Cold War.
It goes both ways. It has been almost 10 years since I visited the PRC but the air and water were heavily polluted with industrial waste, outside the tier 1 cities people were living in makeshift subsistence tin housing, and it wasn’t uncommon to see farmers using oxcarts.
There’s a reason China has a GDP per capita somewhere around that of Argentina.
Of course, they also have futuristic cities, maglev, and plenty of brilliant engineers and scientists, therefore it makes sense to be pragmatic. But there are a lot people talking up China because they hate the US and are bought into a massive propaganda / influencer campaign.
