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464 pages, Hardcover
First published October 4, 2022
At the core of computing is the need for many millions of 1s and 0s. The entire digital universe consists of these two numbers. Every button on your iPhone, every email, photograph, and YouTube video – all of these are coded, ultimately, in vast strings of 1s and 0s. But these numbers don’t actually exist. They’re expressions of electrical currents, which are either on (1) or off (0). A chip is a grid of millions or billions of transistors, tiny electrical switches that flip on and off to process these digits, to remember them, and to convert real world sensations like images, sound, and radio waves into millions and millions of 1s and 0s.
Moore later argued that Noyce’s price cuts were as big an innovation as the technology inside Fairchild’s integrated circuits.--Furthermore, Moore’s Law has relied on cheap labour, especially outsourcing to East Asia (women assembly line labour); see later.
Fairchild, however, was still owned by an East Coast multimillionaire who paid his employees well but refused to give them stock options, viewing the idea of giving away equity as a form of “creeping socialism.”
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.--The author contrasts:
In the early 1960s, it had been possible to claim the Pentagon had created Silicon Valley. In the decade since, the tables had turned. The U.S. military lost the war in Vietnam, but the chip industry won the peace that followed, binding the rest of Asia, from Singapore to Taiwan to Japan, more closely to the U.S. via rapidly expanding investment links and supply chains.…We can challenge this framing by considering the connections between US militarism and South East Asia economic integration: Japan’s re-industrialization was aided by military contracts supporting US bombing of Korea; South Korea’s rapid industrialization was aided by military contracts supporting US bombing of Vietnam: Drums of War, Drums of Development: The Formation of a Pacific Ruling Class and Industrial Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, 1945–1980
[Pentagon analyst Andrew] Marshall’s grim conclusion was that after a decade of pointless fighting in Southeast Asia, the U.S. had lost its military advantage. He was fixated on regaining it. Though Washington had been shocked by Sputnik and the Cuban Missile Crisis, it wasn’t until the early 1970s that the Soviets had built a big enough stockpile of intercontinental ballistic missiles to guarantee that enough of their atomic weapons could survive a U.S. nuclear strike to retaliate with a devastating atomic barrage of their own. More worrisome, the Soviet army had far more tanks and planes, which were already deployed on potential battlegrounds in Europe. The U.S.—facing pressure at home to cut military spending—simply couldn’t keep up.--The author contends that “[o]nly consumer markets had the volume to fund the vast R&D programs that Moore’s Law required.”, and contrasts:
Strategists like Marshall knew the only answer to the Soviet quantitative advantage was to produce better quality weapons.
However, when it came to semiconductors, the Reagan administration’s claim to have stopped the “massive hemorrhage of American technology to the Soviet Union” probably overstated the impact of tighter controls. The USSR’s “copy it” strategy had actually benefitted the United States, guaranteeing the Soviets faced a continued technological lag.…see comments below for rest of the review…
No other facet of the economy is so dependent on so few firms. Chips from Taiwan provide 37 percent of the world's new computing power each year. Two Korean companies produce 44 percent of the world's memory chips. The Dutch company AML builds 100 percent of the world's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, without which cutting-edge chips are simply impossible to make. OPEC's 40 percent share of world oil production looks unimpressive by comparison. The global network of companies that annually produces a trillion chips at nanometer scale is a triumph of efficiency. It's also a staggering vulnerability. The disruptions of the pandemic provide just a glimpse of what a single well-placed earthquake could do to the global economy. (p.xxv)The above quote references the seismic instability of the region. The proximity of China seems even more ominous. The book devotes significant attention to China's use of its significant funds and large potential customer market to leverage business deals that will result in locating the most advance technology in their own country.
Semiconductors recast the economies and politics of America's friends in the region. Cities that had been breeding grounds for political radicalism were transformed by diligent assembly line workers, happy to trade unemployment or subsistence farming for better paying jobs in factories. By the early 1980s, the electronics industry accounted for 7 percent of Singapore's GNP and a quarter of its manufacturing jobs. Of electronics production, 60 percent was semiconductor devices, and much of the rest was goods that couldn't work without semiconductors. In Hong Kong, electronic manufacturing created more jobs than any industry except textiles.
In Washington and in the chip industry, almost everyone had drunk their own kool-aid about globalisation. Newspapers and academics alike reported that globalisation was in fact 'global', that technological diffusion was unstoppable, that other countries' advancing technological capabilities were in the US interest, and that even if they weren't, nothing could halt technological progress. [...] However, 'globalisation' of chip fabrication hadn't occurred; 'Taiwanisation' had. Technology hadn't diffused. It was monopolised by a handful of irreplaceable companies.
However, the messages coming from the chip industry weren't any more coherent than the contradictory leaks from the Trump White House. Publicly, semiconductor CEOs and their lobbyists urged the new administration to work with China and encourage it to comply with trade agreements. Privately, they admitted this strategy was hopeless and feared that state-supported Chinese competitors would grab market share at their expense. The entire chip industry depended on sales to China - be it chipmakers like Intel, fabless designers like Qualcomm, or equipment manufacturers like Applied Materials. One US semiconductor executive wryly summed things up to a White House official: "Our fundamental problem is that our number one customer is our number one competitor".