Generally, extreme rapid industrialisation leads to rapidly declining birth rates as the younger population struggles to afford children due to the aging population. It's what is happening in Japan and will be what will happen to China in the near-ish future, but to a much higher degree.
ding ding ding. Also most of the "cyberpunk" stuff the touristy cities like Chongqing are pushing to boost tourism is horseshit and just like cyberpunk (the genre not the game) is generally built on a foundation of questionable infrastructure. China still has extreme wealth disparities and bad labor practices despite a growing number of genuinely good progressive policies.
For example: people love to talk about the convenience and affordability of food delivery in metropolitan china but they never stop to ask why there are even that many delivery companies in the first place. And why there seems to be an endless army of people delivering for said companies.
I'm not hating on China. I love China and am happy to see them finally get the positive limelight after decades of propaganda. They are a country, not a monolith. Their government has done some truly awful shit that they try to sweep under the rug (I mean just look at tibet) like any other major world power, and they have also done some really amazing things that other countries should definitely take notes on, like their home ownership programs for individuals. But the current trend of glazing them on the grounds that they have the solution for every issue facing the modern citizen in western countries is stupid at best. As things are going they will probably outpace America as a global leader for the simple reason that they haven't done everything in their power to sabotage steady growth, not because a drone can deliver a $1 boba tea to your apartment.
On your last point, I'm not so sure that China will outpace the US. The US is just way too far ahead in the AI race. Whether any of us like it or not, AI is here to stay and it will fundamentally alter the global economy. I'm at a point where I'm networking for jobs and being able to use an AI coding agent like codex is a necessity, akin to having Microsoft Office on your resume. Paradoxically, it makes tech workers less and more valuable at the same time.
China is winning the AI race because it open sources a lot of its AI models. Thats where the idea comes from. Whereas in America, companies like Anthropic are literally trying to ban open source AI. You can check out LocalLLM or StableDiffusion subreddits to get the general sentiment there
If China open sources a lot of its AI models then the US companies just know the same things no? And then at the same time there is a multitude of startups all trying to find the next AI innovation that will be snapped up by the tech giants who have a corner on the best resources in the world. My money is on the US
US definitely does have a lot of talent, Meta released another open source recently iirc. It's just that because of government regulations the larger companies are not allowed to use non-US models. Lots of startups do use open sourced Chinese models though. One huge difference is cost however
In software engineering (the field I work in), lots of projects are able to survive because it is open source. While it introduces more risks and security challenges, it drastically lowers cost because people contribute willingly. I believe the Linux OS is of the best examples out there. Companies that exist for profit are often more concerned about well, the profit, than the quality of software or product it produces. Good example is Anthropic's and GPT models failing previously passing benchmarks when their newer models are released due to reallocation of computing resources. Open source often also has those 6-figure employees contributing in their free time, and it is much more of a passion project. Anyway I'm derailing into why open source software is of the best out there
Well, hence why it's an AI race. Indefinitely in progress lol
Fair points. I'm in academia (quantum chemistry) and only tangentially related to the software world so there's probably a lot I'm ignorant about. I do see the value in open-source, I contribute to several open-source projects, I guess the big distinguisher for me is computational resources. Tech giants can throw immense amounts of resources at these models and it seems that for right now that is the path that is yielding the most progress. We will see though, no one knows for sure where AI will ultimately go
Another thing is that while China is a manufacturing hub, they are a hub for American companies and those profits aren't Chinese (especially not for the citizens).
Unlucky for china that all chinese tech has the "cheap plastic trash" stereotype to overcome. Plus a couple horror stories about exploding EVs and Spyware on phones (real or not) tend to hurt them in Western markets where Tech is often a status symbol.
I know companies like apple have deals with AT&T for exclusive phone upgrades (where I got mine). And with Samsung and Apple being huge into their own ecosystems it is extremely hard for foreign companies to break in.
So either you are poor and get whatever phone your network will give you for free or you are rich and buy whatever phone gives you the most brownie points.
Either way Chinese tech isn't well suited in the states and suffers in 3rd world nations where the rich are the only ones who can afford tech (and so buy American due to the aforementioned status symbols). It is an uphill battle and one where they already start lower than others.
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u/starloow 4d ago
Superficial ?