Comment by Top19 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Top19 | Hacker News Reader

Please HN don’t censor this comment. I legitimately believe that the US and China are on the road to war, and this war will draw on in all the powers of the world.

This comment might be mocked, but if you read into history you can see how unbelievable war seemed within weeks of a conflict. The day WWI broke out the French and German ambassador were trying out each other’s cars and drinking wine in Alsace.

This research center is a bad idea. It’s like if the University of Chicago and Enrico Fermi decided to establish their atomic research lab in Munich in the 1930’s.

Don’t see this as an anti-Chinese comment, if anything the fault lies with Americans who abused, overused, and failed to adjust an international trade/monetary system. The fact that our government is now run by no one who served in or remembered World War II / The Great Depression seems a likely cause of how we went down this path.

If you’re curious for more on this, look into how close the US came to war with China in 1995 in Taiwan. Also look up the RAND Corporation’s study on war with China from 2015.

How many wars were started over tensions concerning research centers / science? WW1 was started by an assassination, WW2 by an aggressive annexation of countries and race-based extermination.

If China and the US go to war, it'll probably be over aggression in North Korea; not over a corporately funded scientific research center.

The parent comment is not claiming that war will start because of a research lab. (S)he is saying it is against the interest of the US to start an AI lab there because AI will be critical to the war effort if there is war.

Maybe that Google sets up an AI lab is not in the interest of the US, but it is in the interest of Google.

Google is a multinational company and its employees come from diverse countries. Although it is headquartered in the US and its founders are American citizens, its core interests may not fully align with the core interests of the US.

That's a gross oversimplification of the reasons for 2 world wars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II

Why would the US go to war with China? What would we gain from it? The US would like real access to the Chinese market, but war isn't a good way to do that, because the Chinese population would refuse to buy anything from US companies. Additionally, the first thing that would happen in a war is that China would stop manufacturing things for US companies, which would massively disrupt the companies, probably cause a stock market crash (for whatever that's worth) because of lowered future profit, and create a shortage of consumer goods. We actually benefit from the way things are now, we get cheap consumer goods, and we get sort-of access to the Chinese market.

I kind of think war could happen, not for the reasons you listed, but because the odds of the US winning such a war might be good but will only go down with time, which is the kind of dynamic that leads to aggression.

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