48
Why America Is Losing the Tech War with China
(nationalinterest.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
48 points (91.4% liked)
World News
2229 readers
173 users here now
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
Fuck no it isn't. It's a useful tool, but it's not anywhere near the level of being able to truly change the world like electricity (or any other equivalently huge invention) imo. Biggest problem is how good visual and audio faking has gotten, we already have a big problem with people falling for facebook minion memes, seeing videos of government officials say they eat babies is going to break people's brains to a never before seen degree
Oh well, at least the hype is distracting the US from attacking the more productive sectors China's economy. US government officials really seem fixated on whatever the current tech buzzword is.
Honestly, the self-driving car hype train from a decade ago made me a bit skeptical about the newest AI wave. In spite of the absolutely massive gains Nvidia's machine learning chips have made, Full Self-Driving is perpetually coming next year according to Tesla.
And the sad thing is that the self-driving vision is mostly about "how do we automate away an already precarious group of taxi/rideshare/lorry drivers."
Notice there's little discussion about automation as an efficiency tool (networking to smooth traffic flow, automatically draft for efficiency, schedule fleet vehicles for maximum utilization) Probably because trains already do it all better.
It's all either economic titans trying to own the space so they can invent dodgy new business models, or wrapping it for consumers as the same old self-indulgent car pap, almighty individual in his overpowered FreedomPod(tm) but now he can play Candy Crush instead of watching for pedestrians.
and honestly no matter how good you make self driving cars, they will always be inferior to trains, which China has plenty of! (although even they are still too carbrained, some of their highways are actual abominations
I kind of wonder, if “Buy America” wasn't a requirement and the US allowed China to bid for High Speed Rail contracts would the US already have decent HSR network by now?
No, the automobile lobby is too strong here. The US used to have an extremely strong railway network before the automobile industrialists destroyed it, and they won’t be letting their cashcow go that easily
And I'm pretty sure the problem is going to be tackled in China while having disastrous effects in the West and all they're gonna say is "ChyNa indErnEt cenSrorShip otoRitarIan"
I'm not even sure China will have to do that much, people there already actually trust the government and its institutions generally, at least much more than Amerikkkans or Europeans do,
Considering western Gamers called China fascist for solving gaming addiction, you're not wrong. The spiritual opium is strong