Trade War with China
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Let's see:
The US takes measures vs Huawai =>
1) destroying or severely containing the company =>
2) reverse tide on China's tech rise =>
3) hamper BRI =>
4) foil plans re currency.
Well well. The US can do all these things with a "surgical strike"! Seems absolutely terrifying, but if you examine this scheme, there's a lot of holes.
Take the first step of this sequence, for example. Huawei is not exactly dead yet. It's handset business is affected, but I see no indications that 5G rollout has been hampered in any serious way. Its cloud services should be completely unaffected, and only part of it's product line in servers will be impacted. But Huawei is a resilient company and it is already entering new lines of business to compensate. The talent, organization, and good morale of the company will continue to serve China well.
But suppose Huawei was actually destroyed, as you say. The second step in the sequence says China' tech rise is reversed. There's no logic in this at all. The number of researchers in china won't drop. China has more people involved in R&D than the US already for several years, the the gap is only growing. I believe the university system is expanding again, after reaching a plateau about a decade ago. If Huawei is the top in 5G, the Pentagon says the Chinese military is beginning to field some technologies which the US does not have. Moreover, China is spawning tons of tech startups, and the country in 2018 surpassed the US in the amount of Venture Capital utilized for the first time. Huawei has been the big story in 2019, but in the last couple of years, it was all about BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent), mobile payments, sharing economy, self driving cars, etc. Huawei has played a good role, but China's tech rise is not the result of one company. Rather, Huawei is the result of China's tech rise.
The third step in the sequence says that China's loss of momentum in "tech rise" will hamper the BRI. I'm not sure why this should follow either. Cellular networks built with Nokia or Ericsson equipment can be used to develop the connectivity China and everybody else wants. And of course, none of this will affect the fiber optic technology for internet, or the pipelines, railroads, roads and power plants. GE and Siemens are being used for the latter in many cases, and it turns out "Western" watts can turn the lights on just as well. Perhaps there will be a bit less Chinese money for the initiative, but political attitudes and interference are playing a much bigger role in holding things back now, and not lack of funds, equipment, or materials. Moreover, the BRI is taking on a life of it's own, as quite a few players see benefits. This includes not only recipients of projects, buy players taking part in building them (Russia, UAE, Switzerland, Japan, to name a few).
I won't bother with the fourth step, as it's too far into fictionland, but I think it's clear the consequences of this "surgical strike" will not be the ones intended, assuming @Arkboy is right about American reasoning. None of these hopes will be realized.
I'm definitely rooting for Huawei and not the likes of Bannon/ Trump /CIA etc...
usa may not have to completely kill off Huawei to achieve its desired impact. Just like the human body doesn't need to lose all of its water contents before it started becoming incapacitated. While its true that China has such a large domestic market that it would be pretty difficult to cause Huawei to totally collapse and close up shop, the easier low hanging fruit that the US is targeting is the containment of Huawei being able to succeed worldwide, in EU and other markets. Now that Huawei's consumer smartphone market is become its main source of revenue and would have been projected to increasingly become a larger portion of the total revenue pie, its by and large the international markets that would have given Huawei's consumer division the most growth. Yes, 5G, AI and other things will remain Huawei's "core" competencies, and the consumer market (selling phones, tablets, laptops etc) is just really a side business albeit large money maker that affords the company the ability to generate massive cash to fund its R&D into its core competencies and indirectly help it maintain and gain ever larger leads over the rest of the world in terms of comparitive advantage ... the US ban on Huawei is undoubtely most detrimental to Huawei's growth (international consumer market) where it hurts the most (where its making the most profits currently).. at a most convenient time for the US, a critical junction point of the implement at rollout of 5G. Even if Huawei does a successfully recovery by 2021, the impact of this ban would have achieved in essence the recapturing of a lot of 5G market in the world that otherwise would have went to Huawei or some other Chinese company. I see the US goal is about a fight for the ecosystem, the technology platform as a whole, mindshare and marketshare on the world stage... It had long ago already hard banned Huawei from US domestically, it knows it cannot kill of Huawei in China, so its goal here is to prevent the spread of the Huawei hegemony internationally, to preserve its own status quo and the technoeconomic order.
Although history is useful and history tells us that no empire or superpoer rules forever, we are at a critical junction point in that this time it may very well be different this time. Imagine if "time travel" was possible, the country that mastered "time travel" first would undoubtable be able to remain on top forever, because it could literally make its own history! Likewise I feel the same applies to AI. Google Deepmind CEO long said that we need to solve artificial intelligence and then use AI to help solve everything else (all the other problems in existence)... he went on to state that AI (the AGI type of super AI) will be mankinds last invention, because all other inventions after that will be done by the AI itself, and man wouldn't be able to complete. So, its fair to say that the country that masters AI first and dominants super AI will be able to be top dog forever.... Bannon, Pompeo, Trump all understand the criticality of winning this new tech race, and the US using bans to gain a few strategic years on China may be all it takes in terms of the difference between 1st place and 2nd place. In today's winner takes all zero sum game world, there is really only first place.
That Deepmind CEO has been spending way too much time with Pleiadians. But even if his propaganda comes true, China will use its time machine to steal it. And in the end, Vanuatu will conquer the planet.
I love that analogy, but why just take what you can carry? Organize that break-in! Bring the truck LOL!
It is naive to think that there is going to be a single AI God. There will be multiple primitive AIs at first, geared towards specific tasks/processes/function (such as the wei qi AI that has made news). Later on, a general purpose AI might be possible, but it will likely be competing with other AIs that are already in existence. There are likely to even be multiple different general purpose AIs that will compete with each other. Some from different countries (likely China and U.S.), and some from different companies (competitors within their own nations). The specialized AIs will likely out-compete the general purpose AIs by a large margin when it comes to the task that they are specialized at, but the general purpose AIs will be more versatile in being able to compete at many different fields.
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
The concern if this continues to escalate is that I could see a next step is where US puts its own companies on a reverse entity list. Right now they are just banning individual Chinese companies from being able to trade or otherwise do business with any US companies, adding five more last Friday. Eventually, they could go all out and telling some of their American companies to stop doing business with all Chinese companies. For example, the Huawei ban so far hasn't targeted OPPO, yet. But an Intel ban or AMD ban would prevent all intel and AMD sales/business to China. As currently China imports more in terms of chips than it does of oil, an all out ban of all chips to China could cripple its economy overnight. Sure America would suffers loses as well, but in its calculus it may determine that long term this would be worth the roll of the dice, so to speak. And if that happens, in retaliation China would have to do something equally as drastic, such as a rare earth ban or something else... and then we quickly devolve into stone age.
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