Every bubble goes through this phase just before it pops. Pre-implosion Twitter had tons of folks doing useless “research” projects, WeWork had folks studying furniture design’s impact on wellbeing, and so on.
When you’re more worried about this sort of stuff vs generating profit then the history books strongly indicate that’s usually not a good omen of what’s coming next.
Technology != company. The tech is here to stay but we still don’t have an example of a company that has figured out how to make a profit off of it. That will come, and it might be OpenAI or Anthropic that does it … but it might not.
You assume that "profit seeking" is universal.
Frankly, it seems extremely unlikely that it will in fact be OpenAI or Anthropic considering all the constraints that are producing massive self-created headwinds for the Wizard of the USA, the center of the empire.
China is not only, under pressures created by the USA, producing immense efficiencies, i.e., working smarter not harder; but they have the immense excess capacity in addition to the secondary capacity to expand said capacity and they have the capital reserves to do all of that in addition to several other positive feedback loop characteristics.
There is a strong case that the USA has very few relative positive characteristics that give it a competitive edge, let alone can keep up with the mind boggling speed at which China is moving, arguably with "profit" not being the end all be all, having a sense of social and cultural obligation that has kept China a more or less intact civilization for over 5000 years, the oldest and most durable civilization humanity has ever created.
I don’t disagree that China has a lot of qualities that are pushing it past the US in many ways, but come on. The “oldest and most durable civilization humanity has ever created” is kind of ridiculous. First of all, what even is a civilization in terms of continuity? Is the People’s Republic of China the same civilization as Ming China? What about Yuan China? And if so, is western civilization not a durable civilization?
Stick to facts and not breathless brown-nosing and you’ll be a lot less off-putting.
It's a fair albeit crude push-back, but it's also more than a valid characterization. I would agree with you on European civilization arguably being an even more durable and definitely more productive and probably the two most important civilizations that need to be preserved by all means necessary, if, e.g., some aliens came to earth and said ok, you can save only two civilizations/cultures and we are just going to snap our fingers and erase all others.
But one thing that is a bit more in favor of the "Chinese civilization" is the relative self-preservation of its home grown culture and civilization. What I mean by that is e.g., Christianity effectively was and has perpetrated the single biggest genocide before that concept was even recently created by the eradication of so many cultures, traditions, customs, and people that we don't even have close to a full understanding of its devastation it has caused from when it swept across Europe as a kind of Asian mental virus (a meme) that saw it eradicating cultures all over Roman Europe and more recently now completely all across Europe in its mutated from of pathological and self-destructive altruism, i.e., emulating the myth of Christ sacrificing themself, i.e., sacrilege, rather than just accepting and internalizing what that sacrifice meant.
I can stick to facts all you want all day long until you are dizzy in the head from things that blow your mental framework out of its hinges.
In the end, regardless of the devastation and destruction the other invasive, parasitic, and viral meme, "communism" has caused the Chinese as much has it was used to destroy and devastate Russia; it looks far more like that Chine will actually recover from the parasitic infestation of "communism" that infected it from Russia, which came from the pale of the settlement of Eastern Europe; where as it stands now, short of events that will surely be monumental history, Europe is effectively going to be eradicated and even more of the indigenous Europeans will be ethnically cleansed and erased and their cultures and people destroyed. That is the trajectory we are currently on either way, whether it can be kinked one way or another notwithstanding.
cmiles8 · · focus · HN ↗
When you’re more worried about this sort of stuff vs generating profit then the history books strongly indicate that’s usually not a good omen of what’s coming next.
bonoboTP · · focus · HN ↗
hyperbovine · · focus · HN ↗
tyrabound · · focus · HN ↗
China is not only, under pressures created by the USA, producing immense efficiencies, i.e., working smarter not harder; but they have the immense excess capacity in addition to the secondary capacity to expand said capacity and they have the capital reserves to do all of that in addition to several other positive feedback loop characteristics.
There is a strong case that the USA has very few relative positive characteristics that give it a competitive edge, let alone can keep up with the mind boggling speed at which China is moving, arguably with "profit" not being the end all be all, having a sense of social and cultural obligation that has kept China a more or less intact civilization for over 5000 years, the oldest and most durable civilization humanity has ever created.
alehlopeh · · focus · HN ↗
Stick to facts and not breathless brown-nosing and you’ll be a lot less off-putting.
tyrabound · · focus · HN ↗
But one thing that is a bit more in favor of the "Chinese civilization" is the relative self-preservation of its home grown culture and civilization. What I mean by that is e.g., Christianity effectively was and has perpetrated the single biggest genocide before that concept was even recently created by the eradication of so many cultures, traditions, customs, and people that we don't even have close to a full understanding of its devastation it has caused from when it swept across Europe as a kind of Asian mental virus (a meme) that saw it eradicating cultures all over Roman Europe and more recently now completely all across Europe in its mutated from of pathological and self-destructive altruism, i.e., emulating the myth of Christ sacrificing themself, i.e., sacrilege, rather than just accepting and internalizing what that sacrifice meant.
I can stick to facts all you want all day long until you are dizzy in the head from things that blow your mental framework out of its hinges.
In the end, regardless of the devastation and destruction the other invasive, parasitic, and viral meme, "communism" has caused the Chinese as much has it was used to destroy and devastate Russia; it looks far more like that Chine will actually recover from the parasitic infestation of "communism" that infected it from Russia, which came from the pale of the settlement of Eastern Europe; where as it stands now, short of events that will surely be monumental history, Europe is effectively going to be eradicated and even more of the indigenous Europeans will be ethnically cleansed and erased and their cultures and people destroyed. That is the trajectory we are currently on either way, whether it can be kinked one way or another notwithstanding.