alt Hacker NewsIf 90% of the data centers in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb tomorrow, communication would be a shit show for a month or two, and then go on, as we'd fall back to simpler, less compute-expensive solutions. We'd also probably be net better off without all the adtech crap.
If 90% of the factories in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb, you'd find that your standard of living would immediately, and quite observably plummet.
You tell me which is more important.
The amount of internet technocrap we actually need to live comfortably is a tiny fraction of what actually gets built. Most of it is in service of adtech, the surveillance state, or shaving 0.5% off some rentseeker's fat margins (on his side, the savings aren't passed on to us).
Whilst manufacturing has more practical value than much of what's in datacentres[1] it doesn't necessarily follow that it's the more valuable strategic play or route to long term economic growth (bubble or no bubble)
Food is more critical to us than Alibaba crap or even top notch smartphones and would be missed rather more if we had a nuclear exchange, but Chinese entrepreneurs would rather own factories exporting manufactured goods than rice paddies, and for good reason. The Chinese government would like to be self sufficient with food production, but unlike many less technologically developed countries it isn't. Most of those countries stay poor though. Food doesn't change or scale as much as manufacturing, which possibly doesn't change as fast or scale as big as compute. Plus in theory at least, some of the compute is being devoted to automating away dependency on offshore labour for manufacturing, although I suspect China is generally ahead in the manufacturing automation areas of AI anyway...
[1]I'd rather have kitchen appliances than novelty image generation, spamblogs or ad retargeting, but then again I'd also rather have access to knowledge and communications than plastic toys...