Chased by The Dragon: The re-emergence of China's technological dominance and it's implications for the rest of the world.

 

The Chinese are hungrier than you are, but not as greedy. 

You don't think silicon Valley could train models affordably?

But then how would cloud providers overcharge for compute resources to try to get in on the action?

How would Wall Street get its cut for doing....whatever the f*** it does? 

Shoot, even the good ol Enron boys need to make a fast buck price gouging electricity sales to California. 

Most of all, we would rather pay NVIDIA more money for hardware than pay American software engineers to write efficient, well crafted code. 

Better to just get substandard scabs from the world over through the H1-B program and treat them like slave labor, and try to make up for the shortfall in quality by throwing more money at hardware than it would have cost to hire the best coders on the god**n planet who happened to live down the way from you. We Americans prefer buying more toys instead of valuing effort, craftsmanship and quality. 

And then jump the gun on laying off your best engineers thinking the second you managed to get LLMs to spit out what looked like coherent functional code you didn't need those pesky peons who toiled away NIGHT AND F***ING DAY WEARING THEIR FINGERS TO THE BONE, so the space Karen giga chads and old money boomer ghouls could pocket all but a fraction of a fraction of the value created by them.

Because that's how the Chinese pulled this off. 

They made better and more innovative use of existing resources to circumvent the increasingly narrowing technological gap America thought it could maintain indefinitely. They wrote better code to make up for their shortcomings in sillicon. 

I need you to understand something. 

China has always....ALWAYS been at the forefront of human technological innovation. 

Paper. Silk. Gunpowder. Currency. Ceramics. 

China has always somehow managed to be the place where technological improvements were most likely to occur. That's why they called it "the Orient", because all the traders from Europe, Arabia and India literally used it as a point of reference for their compasses.

Which, you guessed it, were also invented by the Chinese. 

It is postulated that the reason for this is that the Han Chinese population is the single largest homogenous ethnolinguistic human group. 

The implications for this are kind of profound. 

That means they produce the largest absolute number of people at the upper end of the intelligence spectrum who all speak the same language. 

Thus, not only are they to generate innovation faster just by the sheer statistical force of the fact that your top 1% could constitute the population of multiple western cities, the ideas are transmitted faster and to a larger group of capable mindworkers, leading to a cumulative snowball effect that has the potential to become exponential in its growth. 

Thus, ideas have a larger field in which to emerge, incubate and spread. 

Fortunately right now, the despotic materialism of the Communists serves as a rate limiter on the realization of their creative potential. They think they can beat their geniuses into one-upping America, not knowing it's actually going to make them lie flat. It's like Mao and the sparrows all over again. 

The post-Columbian technological renaissance stopped accelerating sometime around the point where we reached the limit of Moore's law and maxed out semiconductor efficiency. 

Now, we coast on its inertia as it inevitably begins to yield to the friction and resistance of social ills the surplus from that renaissance resulted in. 

And all things being equal, for the reasons indicated above, China tends to always excel in technology and engineering. Since we appear to be arriving at the resolution of the post-Colombian transcontinental species equalization, those age old factors are set to reassert balance.

Here is the problem;

Chinas growth has historically been bounded by the geographic obstacles of mountains, deserts and oceans. These served to check its growth and temper it's technological advantage. It is probably why they are the largest ethnically homogenous population because they live in the largest agriculturally productive region so bounded and over time grew to fill in that space completely. 

But the post-Colombus scene is....very different. 

Now we have planes. Submarines. Missiles. Microchips. Weaponized agents of biological warfare. 

Mountains, deserts and oceans no longer serve as the protective barriers they once did. 

It is with deep dread and foreboding that I say,  Communist China is poised to acquire the means to enslave the rest of the world to its materialistic machine. 

That very soon, America will be the underdog. 

Put down the fighter jets. Dust off your daddy's Kentucky long rifle. 

You're gonna need it. 

I wish you good luck in the wars to come.