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Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

nytimes.com

51–60 of 211 posts

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#51

Having worked in China in the semiconductor industry, it really saddens me what the Chinese are trying to do. You simply cannot out innovate 4 decades of work in a few years no matter how much money you throw at it. Also, China has a branding problem and it is only going to get worse. They can make short term progress but it takes a long time to build a great brand.

>Having worked in China in the semiconductor industry, it really saddens me what the Chinese are trying to do.

I too have worked in China, and there is nothing sad about fighting and investing heavily to catch your competition. If the competition isn't careful, they'll get blindsided just like auto companies were by similar looking Japanese manufacturing investments in the 80s. Japan used to have a reputation for really low-quality manufacturing.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#52
post #47

Notes from the ground here. My undergrad was in EE at an "elite" school - I can say definitively that ~50% of the MS/Ph.d. students in EE were from China (with the other 50% largely from India). They TA'd many of the graduate level courses and were the majority of the students taking high level semiconductor design courses that centered on fabrication and nanotechnology. China's short term goal is clearly to reach pa…

Throughout the 20th century, the United States benefited greatly from this sort of knowledge drain, from war-torn Europe, and from the Soviet sphere of influence. The trend is just reverting to the mean.

Nonsense, many of these countries didn't exist long enough to establish "mean" trends. How old is China? Confucius Institute progpoganda not withstanding, maybe 30 years?

There is only what is now, and how we stop China from fucking us over.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing IP mostly helps manufacturing, It doesn't really help innovation. If they want to build up their semiconductor industry they need to steal the people who are creating IP, which is kinda the opposite of what is happening. the culture that creates new tech is something that china can't steal and it can't replicate it without giving up authoritarian rule.

It’s the same culture that sends tidal waves of students to American universities to earn Ph.Ds, and because of our piss-poor immigration system, most of them have to go back home with all of that valuable education and use it in China or India or wherever instead of the USA.

What is wrong with that? Some of them might not want to stay in the US. Also do you want the US to deprive all other countries of their smart people that might improve their own society also? Its not always us vs them.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the same culture that sends tidal waves of students to American universities to earn Ph.Ds, and because of our piss-poor immigration system, most of them have to go back home with all of that valuable education and use it in China or India or wherever instead of the USA.

The U.S. helps to educate and provide opportunity to people, regardless of national origin - regardless of the arbitrary, invisible lines on a map, drawn by the powerful, in which they were born. Partly as a result, the greatest economic miracle in history has occurred since WWII (and especially since the end of the Cold War), with hundreds of millions of people pulled from millennia of hopeless, abject poverty. Anot…

I'm mostly with everything but the second half of your first sentence here, but unfortunately that embeds such a huge misconception that the net value of your comment could very well be negative unless you acknowledge and clarify/correct this.

The boundaries of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. are "arbitrary [and] invisible" to some extent, and obviously drawn by the powerful. But "the current set of lines are arbitrary and clearly not the only possible solution" does not imply that "no lines is a better solution"; indeed, the latter has only been empirically true when there are preexisting strong and stable force(s) which perform enough of the function of explicit admission criteria to render the latter unnecessary. In real life, you find formerly-exceptional institutions which quickly and irreversibly declined to a lower level after switching to the open admissions policy that your phrasing advocates for (consider the City College of New York in the 30s-60s vs. afterward).

Instead, the most impressive results in both hiring and immigration policy have combined race/nation-blindness with a distinct lack of blindness to other criteria which really do matter. You cannot do the latter (and perhaps more importantly, properly incentivize cultivation of the relevant personal and institutional qualities across the world) without maintaining some "arbitrary, invisible" lines across at least a multi-decade timescale.

So, more immigration and education of foreign students? I'm totally fine with that, for both national and universalist reasons. (This is particularly clear for India, which is a natural US ally. None of the 'frenemy' complications we have with China; I WANT Indians to 'steal' more of our tech!) But only on the right terms, which are not being offered by anyone using the language you're currently using in the second half of your first sentence. I suggest that you explicitly distance yourself from those people if you want the rest of your comment to be heeded by anyone outside your tribe.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing IP definitely helps innovation. To get to the innovation stage you first need to reach parity. There is no faster way to reaching parity than to steal IP. As for the "the culture that creates new tech is something that china can't steal and it can't replicate it without giving up authoritarian rule", that's nonsense that would have found an audience in the 1950's or so when talking about Russia, but it reall…

I disagree with your opinions and your characterization of my argument. I didn't say people will not think about technological problems. Despite the incredible amount of good the party has done for the people of china they are still an authoritarian regime. I don't think authoritarian regimes are good at fostering innovation.

>I don't think authoritarian regimes are good at fostering innovation.

Werner Von Braun would disagree.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#56

Having worked in China in the semiconductor industry, it really saddens me what the Chinese are trying to do. You simply cannot out innovate 4 decades of work in a few years no matter how much money you throw at it. Also, China has a branding problem and it is only going to get worse. They can make short term progress but it takes a long time to build a great brand.

Stealing IP mostly helps manufacturing, It doesn't really help innovation. If they want to build up their semiconductor industry they need to steal the people who are creating IP, which is kinda the opposite of what is happening. the culture that creates new tech is something that china can't steal and it can't replicate it without giving up authoritarian rule.

I've seen papers from back in the cold war documenting a study regarding east german IP theft. The conclusion was stealing IP actually put them behind. You steal the IP, then have to learn how to make it without the context.

So you end up only learning how to reverse engineer production processes - which takes longer without the context, and don't build the skills needed to create the technologies in the first place.

It's like being handed the answers to your calculus class then being asked to move on. It doesn't help.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't need to be 'good' at anything, they just will move slower than an equivalent market based system but eventually they will get there. As long as the rest of the world out-innovates them they may not catch up but do not underestimate the power of over 1 billion people, especially not when a large number of them are very smart. Have a look at China 30 years ago and China today and tell me that that authoritar…

They are catching up, which is a net good for humanity. The highbred command/market economy and the focused bureaucracy of the Party have has been amazingly effective at industrializing and modernizing China. They have lifted many people out of poverty in a very short time. Catching up and innovating are different though. There is so much structure and even culture in China that will make getting ahead in tech and sc…

Have a read:

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/how-china-became-tech-superpo...

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#58
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the same culture that sends tidal waves of students to American universities to earn Ph.Ds, and because of our piss-poor immigration system, most of them have to go back home with all of that valuable education and use it in China or India or wherever instead of the USA.

What is wrong with that? Some of them might not want to stay in the US. Also do you want the US to deprive all other countries of their smart people that might improve their own society also? Its not always us vs them.

See forapurpose’s excellent comment and my reply for the answers to most of your questions.

No, I don’t want to “deprive” other countries of the education their people get here. I work in higher education. I believe in the transformative power of education for everybody. But the American immigration system leaves talent on the table when people who really do want to stay in America are not given the option of a US green card stapled to their US diploma.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#59
post #50

Notes from the ground here. My undergrad was in EE at an "elite" school - I can say definitively that ~50% of the MS/Ph.d. students in EE were from China (with the other 50% largely from India). They TA'd many of the graduate level courses and were the majority of the students taking high level semiconductor design courses that centered on fabrication and nanotechnology. China's short term goal is clearly to reach pa…

Well, if you EE guys would finally got off your high horses and dropped Verilog in favor of JavaScript, we wouldn’t have this kind of problem!!!

Sure, the circuits might catch fire once in a while, but imagine the ease of development when you can get a bunch of underqualified people to develop stuff!

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#60
post #50

Notes from the ground here. My undergrad was in EE at an "elite" school - I can say definitively that ~50% of the MS/Ph.d. students in EE were from China (with the other 50% largely from India). They TA'd many of the graduate level courses and were the majority of the students taking high level semiconductor design courses that centered on fabrication and nanotechnology. China's short term goal is clearly to reach pa…

Well, if you EE guys would finally got off your high horses and dropped Verilog in favor of JavaScript, we wouldn’t have this kind of problem!!!

I left EE and became a full-stack developer! No complaints about JavaScript here. Verilog should just switch to lambdas and get it over with.
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