What does it matter if it takes China years longer to clone the tech through grey market means and RE versus legally actionable means like they are suspected of having done? Individuals in every company are trying to create this. Everyone else will try to copy or clone it. Some will try to misappropriate the IP. Lots of value to be captured or lost.

Nations that provide for their citizens by enabling them to reach their full economic potential will have an advantage over nations that have to buy the labor and output of another country. Skills and knowledge gaps are consequences of investment gaps on the individual level and cause productivity and capital gaps on the national level. International actors appear as countervailing and prevailing forces that create the conditions for a market solution but also encourage territoriality and IP protection schemes as well as other kinds of schemes regarding other people’s intellectual property.

Part of me feels disconnected from this whole argument. I would download a car. I don’t feel bad and I don’t think anyone should for feeling that way. Culture is free. If you didn’t want the world to know about it and use it you shouldn’t have shared your creation, knowledge, invention, or property with society by allowing them to legally acquire it. First sale doctrine and interoperability exceptions to copyright law are clear on this. If I buy a self-driving car, and get the title, it’s really, actually, legally my car now. If I can figure out how my car’s self-driving system works without violating any of the car vendor’s computers, that is my right to do so in order to adapt the car to my needs and desires. Provided I don’t interfere with or prevent the normal operation of the vendor’s computers this should be entirely legal. It is legal to modify the operation of the computers in the cars I own.

Writ large this means China will get their self-driving cars once the first people do because they will be in line buying them like everyone else. Then they will clone the tech just like everyone else. I don’t see what the big deal is besides all the money everyone feels they should be making and conversely all of the money to be saved by making your own system or cloning another. Like all displacement goods it will just take over the market and create a new one where self-driving is an implicit assumption of every car interaction and purchasing decision. It’s just so valuable a technology it won’t be possible to properly control it through traditional means if at all.

All of this is why I think the secret sauce of higher level self-driving to be a very real brass ring, that once snatched, will be hidden behind a velvet rope. It will be licensed and controlled remotely, not owned and operated by the end user and simply mediated by the car offline. I would expect future cars to have always online functionality to enable self-driving functionality checks simply for road safety reasons and also to deter IP leakage via encrypted firmware and remotely validated automatic updates. It will be interesting to see if any kind of open source challenger will appear in such a future. I hope we all get to see it sooner rather than later.