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In the balance of it, creating an technical class within North Korea that is not military in nature is important, I think. NK having its software devs being more civilian is important in the long term for creating a philowestern elite.
If this was a third-world country with limited state power that might make sense. But NK isn't like that. There is no "separate technical class" or "civilian class." If those devs are useful to the military regime, they'll just be transferred to work on whatever the rulers deem useful. Creating more "civilian" devs just frees up more resources to use for blackhat devs. And if they start to act "philowestern" from exposure to the internet, they can just be imprisoned or executed (as many people are who are caught with contraband material, like banned books or even SK dramas on DVD.
This sort of thinking has been tried. For a good long time now, most notably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_Policy. The hope was that giving them free, peaceful aid would make them a more friendly nation. It didn't work, it just gave them enough resources to keep their shitty dictatorship running while they developed nukes and ICBMs. It's astonishing to me that people still think giving them "no strings attached aid" is going to magically change the mind of people who have spent decades running one of the cruelist military dictatorships on Earth.
Academic exchange is not "no strings attached aid". It is a mutual relationship where both parties benefit from the arrangement.
With all due respect to small military dictatorships, I do not believe that they bring forth Einsteins nearly often enough for an arrangement with them to be "mutually beneficial", except in the most literal sense of the word where the other party gets at least a little bit of benefit.
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