China might become the most powerful superpower in the future.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” — Jeff Hammerbacher. For those who don’t know Jeff, he is one of the first people who worked at Facebook and cofounding Cloudera.
The business model of Google, Facebook and Amazon makes most of their profit through targeting ads to the customer. Maximizing the profit require a group of very talented scientists and engineers to optimize the algorithm behind the apps. The role of these companies in our society is supporting other type business to grow faster on the market. It ‘s a good role in my opinion. But there are a lot of downsides with this business model. Privacy is a great example. Facebook has been accused of tracking user activity which is a breach of privacy. But whatever, it ‘s still making billions of dollar every year even if just collecting data on their platform. The US governments decide to leave these companies alone because they are making huge amount of money for the economy and also the portraits of a global superpowers.
The Chinese government is approaching this issues differently. Instead of supporting big tech firms, Chinese government is cracking down big tech firm like Didi, Tencent, Baidu, ByteDance (Tiktok), Alibaba. These companies have one things in common. They provide direct services to the customers. They are not “revolutionary” tech firms. By “revolutionary”, I means that they focus on maximizing their profit (mostly targeted ads) through the platform using algorithms. However, other tech companies in other sectors like AI or semiconductor is safe from this crackdown. The way I see it is that Chinese government believes that in the long run, AI or semiconductor will be their key sectors to win the global economy. It ‘s really hard to predict what will happen in the next 20 years globally but China is changing their strategies and there ‘s a chance they will become superior to USA in terms of economy in the long run.
What do you think will happens? Let me know in the comment.
