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I'm kind of tired of the entire narrative that "US good, everyone else bad", as if only US deserves to hold powerful technology because it will be used for "the
by throwaway_32u10 2y ago
I'm kind of tired of the entire narrative that "US good, everyone else bad", as if only US deserves to hold powerful technology because it will be used for "the greater good", rather than employ it in military applications, as if Anthropic didn't partner with Palantir.
And it amazes me how many people can't seem to see past the "US is good, everyone else are bad" smoke mirror.
- BizarreByte 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoPlease don't take HN threads further into flamewar hell, and certainly not nationalistic flamewar hell. It's repetitive and evokes worse from others. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- StefanBatory 2y agoI mean, in the end, USA is still better than the alternative.
- tuyguntn 2y agoUSA is still better for whom? Can't remember which countries where bombed by China in last 50 years, but I can give you plenty of examples for the USA
- rcarmo 2y agoThe civilizational alternative is Europe. The economic alternative, that we can debate...
- slaw 2y agoEurope, especially UK, France and Germany degraded so much it is no longer any alternative.
- HeadInTheClouds 2y agoWith respect this is a fairly daft comment
- rcarmo 2y agoEconomically, perhaps. Brexit certainly didn't help Europe as a whole, and German, French and Italian politics have been off-kilter for years, but it's still, by and large, an ethical and civilized place to live in. I will freely grant that Euro money goes to completely obsolete heavy industries and luxury items rather than technology innovation (and blame all politicians for missing out on technology), but there are outliers like ASML that almost make up for the whole thing...
- slaw 2y agoUK, German and French cities are no longer civilized places to live in.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoI was in Berlin three weeks ago, what are you even talking about?
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoHow so?
- StefanBatory 2y agoWe are not alternative to anything. We are so hopelessly behind USA, and it doesn't seem it can be changed. Choice is - USA or China. And I certainly know in which world I'd rather live.
- femiagbabiaka 2y agoU.S. and Chinese hegemony are just different kinds of bad. We could put the pros and cons up and debate it endlessly, but in the end ranking them is pointless, humanity should just be trying to make a better alternative
- krapp 2y agoI don't know. Living in a country where being able to shoot people is an absolute, immutable, inalienable right granted by God himself (more so than anything else in the Bill of Rights) but where access to food, shelter, healthcare and education are all expensive privileges subject to the whims of the free market, and where half of the population doesn't even believe viruses are real, and where you don't even need the popular vote to elect a President (it's just nice to have) because the electoral system is a series of 18th century compromises to keep slavers happy... doesn't seem like the best of all possible worlds to me.
- rcarmo 2y agoIt does if you're quickly converging into the Handmaid's Tale universe. May the odds be ever in their favor - I'm quite happy we don't carry guns to make it through the day...
- MiiMe19 2y agoYou do not have a right to other people's work. I should not be forced to give you food because you are too lazy to do it yourself. If you do not work, you do not eat, just like Jamestown.
- krapp 2y agoYes, all the poor are simply lazy, and you yourself have never ever benefited from the collective labor of society.
- MiiMe19 2y agoYou do not deserve to eat just by existing (unless you are disabled or medically cannot work). Saying this is true implies that you have a right to other people's labor, which you do not.
- femiagbabiaka 2y agoLand, water, air and light used to produce food are not owned by any particular human either. The monopolization of that land (at the point of a gun most often) is the beginning of the issue. The overuse of that land, often subsidized heavily by taxpayers, in order to generate exorbitant profit for the few is a rot in human society. Those owners are the actual ones who don't work and expect a reward for it
- k1m 2y agoAbsolutely. Chinese companies shouldn't have chips because their government has "committed human rights violations, has behaved aggressively on the world stage". And the US government hasn't?
- CuriouslyC 2y agoJust wait. By year 2 of Trump 2.0, China is going to be the global good guy that Europe and Latin America make their new best friend.
- rcarmo 2y agoYear 2? We're almost there at _month_ 2.
- CuriouslyC 2y agoOh, people are thinking it now for sure, but it takes a while to retool your relationships and build out a new trade network so you can safely tell a major trading partner to fuck themselves to threats of 100% tariffs.
- rcarmo 2y agoWell, the British did it to Europe, so I'm pretty sure Europe can emulate their winning strategy :)
- bnj 2y agoIsn’t it like… week 2?
- rcarmo 2y agoYou're right. It's been that intense - or I've actually been feeling the shift since the election ended, not the inauguration.
- MiiMe19 2y ago
- dark_glass 2y agoI live here, so I want it to be the best.
- sitkack 2y agoIn a zero sum game kinda way, the game that America understands.
- marricks 2y agoI'm not sure how that relates to original comment. Do you mean you want everything that is or could be better than American technology banned/destroyed so we stay the best...? Like, any global hegemony will be increasingly corrupt given the power that gives, IMO.
- itishappy 2y agoSame. Be nice if we were the best by our own merits though, not by holding back our peers.
- parsimo2010 2y agoFirst- the author of this blog post is the CEO of Anthropic, an American AI company. Of course they are going to argue for export controls if it can hurt their competition. They get to benefit from anticompetitive practices with none of the legal risk! So it's not even about keeping the "bad guys" from having things, it's really about making more profit. Also, you can typically assume that anything a CEO publishes is in a pursuit to raise stock prices, it has nothing to do with morality. If CEOs were moral people most of them wouldn't have become CEOs (there are probably a few CEOs that are truly good people, but I'll bet there are more "wolf in sheep's clothing" CEOs that use an image of morality to improve their company's reputation). Second- aside from the specifics of this post, you don't have to believe that the US is good to see the logic of export controls. There are a number of countries that are openly hostile to the US (Iran and North Korea), and also some that are semi-privately working against the US (like China). These countries will take any advantage that they can- they will steal IP and use the US's development resources to catch up to the current state of the art at a reduced cost. So you don't have to put this in terms of good vs. bad, just think of it in terms of things that benefit the US and things that don't benefit the US. Whether you think people are evil is irrelevant, it is very logical for the US to put export controls on things that it doesn't want to give away for free. The US wants to preserve its advantage and make it as costly and difficult for these other countries to catch up.
- CamperBob2 2y agoHe's unlikely to be writing from a genuinely ideological point of view. He's playing a zero-sum game, in that every chip that goes to China is one that Anthropic and/or its cloud provider doesn't get its hands on. So it makes sense to him to argue for export controls using whatever rhetorical flexes and flourishes he can come up with.
- astrange 2y agoThere's no zero sum games in a growing industry like this.
- CamperBob2 2y agoAs long as the semiconductor fabs are running at capacity, yes, it's one big zero sum game. If you win one chip, I lose one chip, and vice versa. This situation is temporary, of course. China previously had a large incentive to get their own leading-edge nodes into production, and now they have a Manhattan Project-size incentive.
- astrange 2y agoThey aren't running at full capacity on AI chips though - TSMC's main customer is iPhones as far as I know. So you could take away production time for them, though it's still zero-summy. But TSMC is building new leading edge fabs right now.
- Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago[flagged]
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoIt might already be more dangerous in the sense that it is unpredictable. China is autocratic and powerful but their goals are known and do not change at a whim. You can't build diplomatic and trade ties in quicksand.
- dang 2y agoI'm sure most of us agree with you, but independently of that, please don't take HN threads on generic tangents, and certainly not generic nationalistic flamewar tangents. The problem is that it's tediously repetitive and inevitably turns nasty. "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."