| ▲ | dangus 3 hours ago | |
Your first point is ironic considering Western tech companies are being taken to court for training AI off of pirated intellectual property. I’m not trying to be pro-China but I think this idea that “stealing” technology is exclusive to China is naive. There’s a whole classic Silicon Valley story about the development of the GUI at Apple and Microsoft on the subject. Steve Jobs was furious with Bill Gates when Windows debuted especially since Microsoft was a premier Macintosh developer. It’s also a little bit ignorant of the existence of different cultural views of copying. Americans who love the second amendment wouldn’t want Europeans telling them to follow European gun laws, why should China follow Western IP laws? The culture of copying and iterating in the Chinese hardware industry has proven to be incredibly good for innovation and healthy competition, just like open source has been incredibly good for the US software industry. One example of Western IP ideology being stifling: 3D printing was artificially held back from consumers by patents on FDM printing. The moment those patents expired, prices dropped by two orders of magnitude. It’s easy to argue that Western IP laws result in oligopolies and monopolies forming as an inevitability. Even if you don’t agree with that, the fact remains that many technology transfers to China are done willingly for payment (e.g., IBM PC division sold to Lenovo, Motorola Mobility sold to Lenovo, high speed rail technology was sold to China. Nobody twisted Volkswagen’s arm and demanded that they build factories in China and train local workforces on automotive production, that was done for the same profit-seeking reasons Toyota came to America and taught GM the Toyota Production System). Leveraging their coal power for today and building wind/solar/battery for tomorrow is a smart strategy that pragmatically considers their current resource mix. Trump administration canceling already approved wind projects because he doesn’t like how his Scottish golf course has a view of them is not smart strategy. China is not a big oil producer relative to their size and population. In that sense countries like the US, Canada, and Russia are far more energy secure. | ||