There’s also the fact that a war between China and Taiwan is almost certainly going to go hot with the USA too, possibly leading to nuclear exchanges…
It’s much more likely that China eventually starts producing their own state of the art silicon before going to war with Taiwan.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timbajarin/2021/02/16/why-tsmcs...
Europe, for sure is a lot less violent, as for the rest of the world? I won't believe that on face value; south America specifically got more violent, and I suspect everywhere else is a wash (or is not attributable to American force projection). I attribute the peace in Europe to the EU rather than pax Americana.
Overall violent death is down on planet Earth drastically over time.
But I’m with you, on balance wmds are terrible things. One use of them could outweigh all the violence they prevented.
That is one heck of an understatement.[0] The global economic benefit of the stability brought by the US military being top-dog is vast, and appears to benefit many countries including China. There are plenty of valid criticisms of Pax Americana, but the global economic benefit, not so much imho.
The hypothesis is that if most high compensation workers are remote, it opens up those labor markets to more competition from lower cost regions.
IOW, as Covid-19 forces organizations to become remote-first, they perforce also become more outsourcing-friendly, or at least outsourcing-capable.
Also, while COVID is going to accelerate the shift to remote work in the US, the vast majority will be <100% truly async remote. It's the 1-20% of edge case requirements that are really hard to mitigate. The ability to answer a phone call at 2pm Eastern Time and hop on a plane to Chicago is way different for someone from Manila than it is for someone from Cleveland, even if they only do it occasionally.
I agree, for a variety of reasons, but there is a joker in the deck: will the distribution of required skill change over time? IOW, should we expect demand to grow faster at the low end of the information economy, in the middle, or at the top? I don't think it is too reasonable to expect the distribution to remain fixed over time.
Right now, we've been seeing a lot of growth in demand at the top end, but that was true for the 'service economy' at the start too. The irony of the scenario where increasing automation depresses the wages of the lowest skill jobs because they can most easily be filled with fungible human labor while expanding the demand for workers to fill them due to Jevon's Paradox should not be lost on us.
It is entirely possible that entry-level software work will become as much of a dead-end job as being a customer service representative.
There was an article in The Economist a couple of weeks ago saying that that may no longer be the case, I mean the US automatically siding with Taiwan in case of China's aggression. Take that as you will, I looked at it as an establishment mouthpiece airing valid concerns that some members of said establishment have regarding US's "seriousness" in the region.
https://www.economist.com/china/2021/02/20/china-faces-fatef...
Seems to me it's concerned about "America’s ability to deter an invasion over Taiwan", not about it "showing resolve when talking about China and Taiwan".
The strategic concern they are raising is not economic, it's a security issue and the two are quite different. From the strategic security view it doesn't matter so much who makes these products, what matters is ensuring continuity of availability on the one hand and excluding interference or compromises of the integrity of the supply chain on the other. The latter is to do with things like an opponent interfering in the quality of parts, introducing backdoors and such.
In these two views of course on shore manufacturing is easier to secure in both senses, but that's a side effect not an absolute. For example if the USA had sovereign territory next to China, a fab there would still be highly vulnerable to interference in the physical supply while a fab in Canada next to the US border would be much more physically secure from Chinese or Russian interference. From a security perspective there's nothing magical about being on US territory.
A lot of these debates seem to very rapidly pivot into discussions about on shore US manufacturing and falling behind technologically, where what they're really talking about is skills and economic benefits. Those are a very different issue though.
Even looking just at the technology it's not a simple calculation either. The best lithography systems are manufactured in Holland, any fab anywhere wanting to use the best processes is dependent on them and these are the most critical parts of the process. The location of the fab is just one part of the puzzle. In today's highly integrated world no one country can even hope to own all the essential elements in high tech supply, chain. The common simplistic view of iPhone manufacturing is another example of this. The majority of the most advanced components in an iPhone to this day aren't made in China. The camera module in Japanese, the CPUs come from Taiwan, flash memory and batteries mostly from South Korea and Japan I think, Gorilla glass I'm not sure about now, it used to be made in the US. Only final assembly and some low value components are Chinese, and yet iPhones are 'Made in China'. Would moving low value, low skilled final assembly really benefit the USA all that much? That's a more extreme example, but from a supply chain and technology point of view it's the same (to a much lesser extent to be sure) with chip fabs. Critical components come from all sorts of different countries and companies.
So ok building more advanced fabs in the US is a sensible move on a whole variety of axes, but it doesn't solve all of the problems and even when it does, it's not always for the most obvious reasons.
Pre ww2 the US was pretty isolationist. A very, "Sounds like a whole lot of your problem and not mine" kind of country. The foot dragging for both world wars is pretty evident. I've read and personally do believe it's attributed by the fact we are a melting pot of people. That's important for the distinction of, "I left xyz country for a reason and came to this country to get away from their bullshit." That's a very toned down version of what my own dad told me on my 18th birthday when he gave me the full story of leaving soviet occupied Poland. I'm pretty sure theres a lot of grand amd great grand folks with similar sentiments when they left the old country in the late 1800s and early 1900s. People didnt uproot and enter a foreign land with no support just because they bored and doing well in their home country. This, I believe, leads to a self reliance mindset since there's a... disdain... for the rest of the world.
So the security aspect, absolutely. I think the want for all manufacturing in general stems from the self reliance, isolationist desire with security as a very good, logical excuse. However, even in bizarro world if a security argument wasn't good enough alone, this anti-global-reliance wouldn't go away.
The US gov't has underwritten a few niche industries for decades such as supercomputing (e.g. Cray and TMC) and crypto. But for some reason they've been reluctant to do this more broadly for other essential industries like microelectronics, telecom, battery tech, and more. Clearly the potential repercussions of such oversights should compel this laissez-faire policy to be reconsidered.
Nobody in the US decided to let Holland develop more advanced lithographic systems for chip manufacturing, or to let ARM in the UK come up with a more efficient processor architecture.
Isn't Samsung nearly on par with them? (Not that two is a much better situation.)
It (perhaps naively) seems like most applications could theoretically make due with older processes, but I have difficulty imagining supply chains successfully coping with such a switch (not that I know anything about it).
There is also the capacity issue:
TSMC has 28% of the semiconductor market under 40nm, Samsung has 10%.
As a foundry, it's ~55% vs ~17%. Add in UMC and a few others and it's 64% Taiwan. Definitely a critical dependency.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/TSMC-has-the-largest-market-sh...
https://www.eenewsanalog.com/news/foundry-market-jumps-24-pe...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16463/snapdragon-888-vs-exyno...
"The best human operator cannot defend against multiple machines making thousands of maneuvers per second potentially moving at hypersonic speeds and orchestrated by AI across domains."
Attacks by drone swarms are already here. The first one was Syria vs. Russia in 2018.[1] There was an attack on Saudi oil facilities in 2019.[2]
Much of this has little to do with AI. It's more about the US falling further behind in manufacturing.
[1] https://tripwire.dhs.gov/news/209478
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2019/09/16/why-the-atta...