Why do some cultures gladly pay more for convenience, while others opt to invest time and energy to save money?

The paper outlines China’s debate over whether to buy NVIDIA H200 chips for short-term AI acceleration or reject them to protect long-term technological autonomy. It argues that while Chinese firms need advanced compute, authoritative Chinese commentary worries that H200 purchases could deepen dependence on U.S. hardware, export controls, security risks, and NVIDIA’s CUDA software ecosystem.

The conversation about artificial intelligence is often framed around which jobs will disappear. But perhaps the more revealing question is: what do people do when they think their jobs might disappear?