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Comment by wilsonnb3 | Hacker News Reader

> I honestly think we're past the point as a species where superpowers duke it out in such a literal fashion. It's just bad for business.

It's bad for business until it's not. Isolationist economic policies will over time make war more likely.

> Between the spread of the companies it effectively owns, and the deals being made with the rest of the world's most powerful tech companies, China will soon wield more influence than the U.S. I don't think it'll be long before surveillance-states are the norm.

I'm not sure about China wielding more influence than the U.S. That sort of thing is really hard to predict accurately, especially from the perspective of someone who isn't a world leader privy to all available information.

I do agree that surveillance states will be the norm, though, at least everywhere that doesn't currently have a democracy functioning well enough to prevent it.

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"I'm not sure about China wielding more influence than the U.S. That sort of thing is really hard to predict accurately, especially from the perspective of someone who isn't a world leader privy to all available information."

I think at the end of the day it just comes down to the numbers. With four times the population, they have four times the market of consumers and four times the workforce to create value. The U.S. is still in the lead for now, somehow, but China has recently taken up a very potent type of hybrid economic development, where free-market startup-culture is encouraged, but guided and pruned by the government.

> but China has recently taken up a very potent type of hybrid economic development, where free-market startup-culture is encouraged, but guided and pruned by the government.

I don't think the USA gets enough credit for inventing this hybrid economic development system. Good examples include:

* Military computing -> Intel, IBM, etc. -> Moore's law

* DARPA cash -> early networking/PC projects at universities -> hacker/hobbyist culture -> Microsoft and Apple

* Gov't really emphasized "finding information" in CS the 1990's -> NSF grants at Stanford -> Google.

* The Human Genome Project -> Illumina, Solexa, etc. -> Moore's law-shaped cost curve for sequencing

And less R&D heavy examples like the national railways and the interstate highway system.

This pattern continues today. Self-driving cars started as several decades of NSF-funded research projects that turned into a DARPA-funded competition a decade-ish ago that turned into an industry-funded goal rush today.

Google and Apple and Microsoft and Facebook and Amazon are each American companies who do business in Europe. I, as European, get very little out of that though because they dodge taxes.

Your base assumption seems to be that world influence has a positive linear relationship with population size, which is not something that I agree with.

I don't necessarily disagree with it either, though. I think the situation is far more complex to boil down to just that.

I would amend that to say the potential for world economic influence has a positive linear relationship with population size. Clearly population alone doesn't do it, since China doesn't yet have the economic weight of the U.S., but they have a much greater capacity for growth.

That I generally agree with!

It is possible that they are actually so large that it will start working against them. Like an animal so large that it can't eat enough food to stay alive.

I am certainly looking forward to seeing what happens, though. It's a very interesting time to be alive and I hope that China does keep growing enough to provide all of it's citizens with a quality life. They've made great strides in the past half century, in spite of their current government's many flaws.

"I hope that China does keep growing enough to provide all of it's citizens with a quality life"

I would agree if it weren't for the ideology that would come with it. My dream scenario is that their government's corruption will increase until it collapses like the Soviet Union, leaving behind a society that's actually much better equipped than the soviets to hit the ground running in a liberal democracy (given the country's partial embrace of capitalism), and then they'll grow enough to provide all their citizens with a quality life. But that series of events seems unlikely.

On the other hand, if one believes automation and AI is competing with and encroaching on the economic productivity of humans, then having a larger population can potentially be an economic liability.

Hmm. Interesting take. I hadn't thought about that.

China is facing a huge demographic problem, as well as a geographic problem. This book changed how I thought about this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Superpower-Generation-Amer...

> I do agree that surveillance states will be the norm, though, at least everywhere that doesn't currently have a democracy functioning well enough to prevent it.

What's ironic is that the very thing that will bring about surveillance states in the western world is democracy. Of course it will be framed as anti-terrorism measures. But surveillance is suveillance.

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