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Comment by _ink_ | Hacker News Reader

But isn't it easier to copy some existing approach than to create it from a green field? ASML tech is presumably highly protected, but China is also very good in spying, hacking etc.

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Yes. But it's not as simple as just having access to ASML's ip. They have exclusive rights to all the components and inputs, which are also protected and are also hard to make.

It's a whole system that China needs to duplicate.

This stuff is really hard to copy. China basically had to put in all the cold era materials research along with getting up to speed on current tech, from scratch. They were/are always going to catch up because they have the resources to, but there are no shortcuts.

The patent system is very strong evidence that there are shortcuts. So many that we have laws designed to protect and incentivize version 1.

Sure, there’s some hard lessons along the way; but far, far, far fewer than figuring it out in the first place.

And this misplaced assumption about how China won’t be able to innovate when standing on the shoulders of giants (with you saying ‘are always going to catch up’) looks only at the last 100 years and forgets the millenia before it. The West is not magically superior.

There are just some things that China can’t access and they have to reinvent on their own. Like 50 years of intensive materials research that is locked away in a safe and access is heavily restricted. Yes, China could innovate by standing on the shoulders of giants if they had access to the giants, they simply don’t have access.

I struggle to imagine that all 50 years have been wholly blocked from all international research students. That seems highly implausible.

Edit: for a comparison, it took the Soviet Union 4 years to have their own Atom Bomb after the US dropped two.

Again, the Cold War and moon shots generated ALOT of data that the west keeps locked up very well. I don’t think we can really fathom today the resources they dumped into figuring things out, and how much we’ve been coasting on that work.

Are you intentionally invoking the same style of argument of Ancient Aliens and rejecting all public - that is, *in the open* work that thousands of scientists have done over the last 50 years and instead preferring to create a scenario where we invented everything 50 years ago and are slow-trickling it into the world?

Like, Independence Day style?

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