The way for China to avoid war is to simply outperform Taiwan in semi-conductor building capability and capacity, in order to diminish the nation's strategic significance to the US, and then to just wait for the nation to drift back into China's fold. Only China has drive and patience to accomplish this.
"The Soviet Union hoped to lead the computer revolution" They hoped many things but they didn't invest much in computing. By 1970 they decided that it's better to just pirate american computers. By the 80's the soviet computer industry was far behind the world market so they bought the cheapest stuff from Taiwan.
China is far more serious than the soviets when it comes to actually achieve its goals but the truth is that has been no technological paradigm change in decades and there is little reason to believe that there is going to be one soon. China profited from the Great Stagnation because it allowed them to catch up but placing a bet that it will end conveniently right now will fail like Japan's bets on robotics and other technologies failed to reignite their growth in the 90's.
Very interesting. I suppose the obvious follow-on question is, can the theory be falsified? Is there an example of a more technologicially-advanced power that found itself on the losing end of rivals with better military strategy and diplomatic acumen? The only potential example I can think of would be the western Roman empire, but I'm not sure how much more meaningfully advanced they were than the Franks or Huns. They had sewers and baths, but it was all still muscle power making it work.
Is China also investing heavily in nuclear (fusion or fission) alongside renewables?
Good food for thought - but I disagree with at least 3/4.
For the Nazis, yes they deployed early versions of 1950s weapons as a Hail Mary but it's not as if the Allies weren't working on similar ideas - they just didn't need to rush production because they already had the war won with optimised versions of 1940s tech. And nothing says 'qualitative technological advantage' like a mushroom cloud.
I don't know enough about the Song, beyond that they're a commonly-cited "what if?" for an early industrial revolution that didn't happen - emphasis on "didn't"; had they implemented steam power, that may have changed things.
I don't think the Mongols or other nomads were less technologically advanced than their opponents, any more than the Franks or Huns were v the Romans even if they smelled worse. Nomadic empires (Huns/Xiongnu, Mongols, Timurids) notably all arose before the development of gunpowder armies, and there was never another one after the Russians started moving east with rifles. I may be wrong but I don't believe the Manchus were still mostly nomadic at the time of their conquest of Ming China? That may be a counterexample if so.
Wasting blood and treasure on wars of choice is an ancient hegemon behaviour - being able to give up and go home at the end of one (never mind two, half a century apart) is perhaps exactly why you want to be an industrial revolution ahead of the competition.
When I said the Nazis I was primarily thinking of the main front in which the war was fought and won.
Technological prowess is often correlated with industrial capacity, but they are not quite the same thing. The USSR of 1942 had greater strength in the second than the first.
"Their plan succeeds most readily if those are years of peace."
Depends on what the meaning of "peace" is, doesn't it? Think of the tremendous technological advances made during WWII under the unrelenting time pressure of warfare -- no room for DEI considerations there; only results counted.
Now China certainly would not want kinetic warfare with the US or anyone else, like India. An existential conflict WILL go nuclear. But if China acts internally with the urgency of a war-time ethos, their continued technological progress might surprise the West.
We have to remember that, in less than a human lifetime, China has gone from effectively nothing to being the world's largest producer of steel, automobiles, ships. They have built by far the world's largest High Speed Rail network, along with a massive highway system, state-of-the-art airports, the world's most active nuclear power plant construction program, their own Space Station, and have landed probes on the far side of the Moon. There are more Chinese citizens getting STEM PhDs at US universities than there are US citizens.
China may well stumble, because everyone makes mistakes -- but if this were a card game, today I would rather have their hand than ours.
China has for the past few decades been characterized by political and economic decentralization, with cities (in the cases of big ones, "city counties") being the largest source of government spending and revenue raising (which is important, because its their money) with the provincial level being the second biggest and the national level the smallest. City governments also wield direct control over much of the operations of the state owned enterprises in their jurisdiction, they also have the ability to engage in economic policy (they even d tings like local industrial policy and sometimes even illegal things like local trade protectionism), and they do things like local capital flow inhibitors, they run the details of non-party ideology educational/training policy, etc.., etc.. The USA used to be like this, if Xi changes this then the science leaps likely will not work out, but if he maintains it while pursuing this, in my view, enlightened national policy, then China just might breakout into the future...
> In my mind the only route by which AI could lead to an industrial revolution-sized disruption is if it unlocks advances in more fundamental industries, such as energy or materials science. Imagine a future where we replace the steel in our skyscrapers with synthetic spider silk—that is the sort of transformation that might justify comparisons to the industrial revolution. AI might open the door to this sort of future, but this is not what most people who make predictions about AI’s economic potential like to talk about.
I would argue that AI is the most likely way to unlock such fundamental physical advancements, because it will require improved models of complex, emergent physical phenomena, which can only be modeled with AI. Furthermore, I think China and America are fairly equally matched in a race to use AI for such a techno-scientific revolution. I argue for these two claims here: https://calvinmccarter.substack.com/p/on-ai-biology-and-chinas-prospects
Imma make a note here that China has a thorium reactor. Even if it's not perfect they'll have a real solid miniature modular replicable design within a few years!
It's maddening that almost no one mentions this. The petro dollar and the west is truly BTFO for the next 1000 years if China is even 1/4 as far along as they say they are. I'm almost certain that the west would fire their entire nuclear arsenal at China if this singular technology were perfected and it's simply one of a host China is trying to rev up.
The truly truly stupid part is that the technology isn't new. Most of the real cutting edge stuff was made in 1900-1970 and has been entirely discarded, opposed or sabotaged by some combination of Silents and Boomers, mostly Boomers nowadays. Thorium reactors, light based cell signaling and healing, electrical universe theory, gel-like 4th state of water, targeted molecule dye medicine, even the humbler low carb diets, mitochondria based plant breeding and muscle hypertrophy theories. I'm having to read 100yr old papers to get an accurate picture to what's happening in the universe because everything overseen by boomers today, 1970s onwards, is complete trash that's not based in any sort of actual reality. The boomer tools are ridicule, impoverishment, assassination, sabotage, etc.
The 'science slowdown' is completely imposed top-down for the entire reign of the silent-boomer, for their personal benefit. As soon as they die the lid comes off and a new Renaissance begins. China already has gotten the party started and, had Trump executed all of the Deep State, we'd be ahead of even them in the game. Hundreds of people are chomping at the bit but, as Covid showed, armies of faceless masked goons in all the beurocracies are equally restless to kill us.
Fascinating POV. A few niggles about "Western analysts blame [China's] slowing growth on a variety of factors":
1. a communist bureaucracy paralyzed by purges and confused by an unfavorable economic environment;
2. ‘animal spirits’ that never recovered after being caged by zero-COVID;
a property bubble too large to pop;
3. policies that favor state investment in a country where savings rates are too high and consumption rates too low".
You got off on the wrong foot. China's growth is accelerating, not slowing.
It will hit $1.7 trillion this year, compared to our $300 billion. Only four years in world history have seen an economy grow this fast.
The paralyzed Communist bureaucracy, btw, planned and managed that growth.
Animal spirits have recovered sufficiently to run a booming economy.
The high savings rate means low borrowing costs to finance the switch to a high tech economy. Which, incidentally, saw 330,000 robots installed there last year, compared to our 30,000.
I don't think China can keep up with the US in deploying cutting edge technology without more developed financial markets. Carlota Perez in "Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages" makes the argument pretty well how essential that is.
Even if China develops the tech. We'll deploy it quicker / better.
This is an interesting contrast with Wang Huning's thoughts (https://scholarstage.substack.com/p/american-nightmares) regarding excessive American optimism around technology solving problems that are political in nature. I wonder if the simpler answer is that the CCP is incentivized to believe that technical solutions could keep them in power while suppressing dissident ideologies whereas political reforms could possibly destabilize their power. I say this because I've heard anecdotally that the CCP believes the true reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union was Gorbachev's reforms which signaled weakness, hence the Chinese govt's attitude during the Tiananmen Square protests.
Ultimately, I take the Arendtian view that political problems require political solutions.
The way for China to avoid war is to simply outperform Taiwan in semi-conductor building capability and capacity, in order to diminish the nation's strategic significance to the US, and then to just wait for the nation to drift back into China's fold. Only China has drive and patience to accomplish this.
"The Soviet Union hoped to lead the computer revolution" They hoped many things but they didn't invest much in computing. By 1970 they decided that it's better to just pirate american computers. By the 80's the soviet computer industry was far behind the world market so they bought the cheapest stuff from Taiwan.
China is far more serious than the soviets when it comes to actually achieve its goals but the truth is that has been no technological paradigm change in decades and there is little reason to believe that there is going to be one soon. China profited from the Great Stagnation because it allowed them to catch up but placing a bet that it will end conveniently right now will fail like Japan's bets on robotics and other technologies failed to reignite their growth in the 90's.
Very interesting. I suppose the obvious follow-on question is, can the theory be falsified? Is there an example of a more technologicially-advanced power that found itself on the losing end of rivals with better military strategy and diplomatic acumen? The only potential example I can think of would be the western Roman empire, but I'm not sure how much more meaningfully advanced they were than the Franks or Huns. They had sewers and baths, but it was all still muscle power making it work.
Is China also investing heavily in nuclear (fusion or fission) alongside renewables?
Arguably Nazi Germany, and perhaps imperial Germany as well.
The Song Dynasty, most famously vs. the Jin, but also the Liao and the Mongols.
Most people against the Mongols.
America in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Good food for thought - but I disagree with at least 3/4.
For the Nazis, yes they deployed early versions of 1950s weapons as a Hail Mary but it's not as if the Allies weren't working on similar ideas - they just didn't need to rush production because they already had the war won with optimised versions of 1940s tech. And nothing says 'qualitative technological advantage' like a mushroom cloud.
I don't know enough about the Song, beyond that they're a commonly-cited "what if?" for an early industrial revolution that didn't happen - emphasis on "didn't"; had they implemented steam power, that may have changed things.
I don't think the Mongols or other nomads were less technologically advanced than their opponents, any more than the Franks or Huns were v the Romans even if they smelled worse. Nomadic empires (Huns/Xiongnu, Mongols, Timurids) notably all arose before the development of gunpowder armies, and there was never another one after the Russians started moving east with rifles. I may be wrong but I don't believe the Manchus were still mostly nomadic at the time of their conquest of Ming China? That may be a counterexample if so.
Wasting blood and treasure on wars of choice is an ancient hegemon behaviour - being able to give up and go home at the end of one (never mind two, half a century apart) is perhaps exactly why you want to be an industrial revolution ahead of the competition.
When I said the Nazis I was primarily thinking of the main front in which the war was fought and won.
Technological prowess is often correlated with industrial capacity, but they are not quite the same thing. The USSR of 1942 had greater strength in the second than the first.
The Atlantic? ;)
"Their plan succeeds most readily if those are years of peace."
Depends on what the meaning of "peace" is, doesn't it? Think of the tremendous technological advances made during WWII under the unrelenting time pressure of warfare -- no room for DEI considerations there; only results counted.
Now China certainly would not want kinetic warfare with the US or anyone else, like India. An existential conflict WILL go nuclear. But if China acts internally with the urgency of a war-time ethos, their continued technological progress might surprise the West.
We have to remember that, in less than a human lifetime, China has gone from effectively nothing to being the world's largest producer of steel, automobiles, ships. They have built by far the world's largest High Speed Rail network, along with a massive highway system, state-of-the-art airports, the world's most active nuclear power plant construction program, their own Space Station, and have landed probes on the far side of the Moon. There are more Chinese citizens getting STEM PhDs at US universities than there are US citizens.
China may well stumble, because everyone makes mistakes -- but if this were a card game, today I would rather have their hand than ours.
China has for the past few decades been characterized by political and economic decentralization, with cities (in the cases of big ones, "city counties") being the largest source of government spending and revenue raising (which is important, because its their money) with the provincial level being the second biggest and the national level the smallest. City governments also wield direct control over much of the operations of the state owned enterprises in their jurisdiction, they also have the ability to engage in economic policy (they even d tings like local industrial policy and sometimes even illegal things like local trade protectionism), and they do things like local capital flow inhibitors, they run the details of non-party ideology educational/training policy, etc.., etc.. The USA used to be like this, if Xi changes this then the science leaps likely will not work out, but if he maintains it while pursuing this, in my view, enlightened national policy, then China just might breakout into the future...
> In my mind the only route by which AI could lead to an industrial revolution-sized disruption is if it unlocks advances in more fundamental industries, such as energy or materials science. Imagine a future where we replace the steel in our skyscrapers with synthetic spider silk—that is the sort of transformation that might justify comparisons to the industrial revolution. AI might open the door to this sort of future, but this is not what most people who make predictions about AI’s economic potential like to talk about.
I would argue that AI is the most likely way to unlock such fundamental physical advancements, because it will require improved models of complex, emergent physical phenomena, which can only be modeled with AI. Furthermore, I think China and America are fairly equally matched in a race to use AI for such a techno-scientific revolution. I argue for these two claims here: https://calvinmccarter.substack.com/p/on-ai-biology-and-chinas-prospects
Imma make a note here that China has a thorium reactor. Even if it's not perfect they'll have a real solid miniature modular replicable design within a few years!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1#:~:text=The%20project%20was%20started%20in,before%20converting%20to%20continuous%20mode.
Here's Karl Denninger talking about why it's so important:
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2491667
It's maddening that almost no one mentions this. The petro dollar and the west is truly BTFO for the next 1000 years if China is even 1/4 as far along as they say they are. I'm almost certain that the west would fire their entire nuclear arsenal at China if this singular technology were perfected and it's simply one of a host China is trying to rev up.
The truly truly stupid part is that the technology isn't new. Most of the real cutting edge stuff was made in 1900-1970 and has been entirely discarded, opposed or sabotaged by some combination of Silents and Boomers, mostly Boomers nowadays. Thorium reactors, light based cell signaling and healing, electrical universe theory, gel-like 4th state of water, targeted molecule dye medicine, even the humbler low carb diets, mitochondria based plant breeding and muscle hypertrophy theories. I'm having to read 100yr old papers to get an accurate picture to what's happening in the universe because everything overseen by boomers today, 1970s onwards, is complete trash that's not based in any sort of actual reality. The boomer tools are ridicule, impoverishment, assassination, sabotage, etc.
The 'science slowdown' is completely imposed top-down for the entire reign of the silent-boomer, for their personal benefit. As soon as they die the lid comes off and a new Renaissance begins. China already has gotten the party started and, had Trump executed all of the Deep State, we'd be ahead of even them in the game. Hundreds of people are chomping at the bit but, as Covid showed, armies of faceless masked goons in all the beurocracies are equally restless to kill us.
Fascinating POV. A few niggles about "Western analysts blame [China's] slowing growth on a variety of factors":
1. a communist bureaucracy paralyzed by purges and confused by an unfavorable economic environment;
2. ‘animal spirits’ that never recovered after being caged by zero-COVID;
a property bubble too large to pop;
3. policies that favor state investment in a country where savings rates are too high and consumption rates too low".
You got off on the wrong foot. China's growth is accelerating, not slowing.
It will hit $1.7 trillion this year, compared to our $300 billion. Only four years in world history have seen an economy grow this fast.
The paralyzed Communist bureaucracy, btw, planned and managed that growth.
Animal spirits have recovered sufficiently to run a booming economy.
The high savings rate means low borrowing costs to finance the switch to a high tech economy. Which, incidentally, saw 330,000 robots installed there last year, compared to our 30,000.
I don't think China can keep up with the US in deploying cutting edge technology without more developed financial markets. Carlota Perez in "Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages" makes the argument pretty well how essential that is.
Even if China develops the tech. We'll deploy it quicker / better.
This is an interesting contrast with Wang Huning's thoughts (https://scholarstage.substack.com/p/american-nightmares) regarding excessive American optimism around technology solving problems that are political in nature. I wonder if the simpler answer is that the CCP is incentivized to believe that technical solutions could keep them in power while suppressing dissident ideologies whereas political reforms could possibly destabilize their power. I say this because I've heard anecdotally that the CCP believes the true reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union was Gorbachev's reforms which signaled weakness, hence the Chinese govt's attitude during the Tiananmen Square protests.
Ultimately, I take the Arendtian view that political problems require political solutions.