I read somewhere that the fabs are already equipped with bombs that can be made to explode if there is an invasion from China. Considering how clean those places have to be in order to work, this can cause immense damage to those fabs.
Not sure they have bombs but they are pretty delicate.
In reality China has another option. They could just demand semiconductors or else they would close the tap on rare-earth elements [1] and by doing so crashing the economy.
Even more so if they annex/invade Vietnam.
Other countries have availability, but only China has the supply chain to extract and process these elements at scale. For any other player to step up production to match current demand it would take years.
Yeah thanks to the fact that you need international collaboration to scale cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing it's very unlikely that a single nation, even if they discovered general AI, could terrorize the world with an autonomous robot army, because even general AI needs chips to run on.
It seems pretty weird to go to work everyday with bombs set all over the factory you work in. What if it blows up by accident or a disgruntled worker pulls the bomb lever.
I don't believe that for a moment. Much more likely the complex machines could be simply disabled and their firmware wiped by remote management. This happens with other stuff too, you can't even stealthily move it, because of embedded GPS and the like.
edit: Apart from that, what would that stupid act do to the economy of the involved parties, and the world in general?
Comments
I read somewhere that the fabs are already equipped with bombs that can be made to explode if there is an invasion from China. Considering how clean those places have to be in order to work, this can cause immense damage to those fabs.
Not sure they have bombs but they are pretty delicate. In reality China has another option. They could just demand semiconductors or else they would close the tap on rare-earth elements [1] and by doing so crashing the economy. Even more so if they annex/invade Vietnam.
Other countries have availability, but only China has the supply chain to extract and process these elements at scale. For any other player to step up production to match current demand it would take years.
[1] https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/geopolitics-rare-eart...
China already tried that trick with Japan and it turned out to not be a big deal.
Don’t you think that will start WWIII in itself? Vietnam definitely won’t go down without fight, and they have a pretty good track record.
IIRC the fabs are Dutch made too, so it’s not clear if you could rebuild them with knowledge and material in Taiwan alone.
Yeah thanks to the fact that you need international collaboration to scale cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing it's very unlikely that a single nation, even if they discovered general AI, could terrorize the world with an autonomous robot army, because even general AI needs chips to run on.
It seems pretty weird to go to work everyday with bombs set all over the factory you work in. What if it blows up by accident or a disgruntled worker pulls the bomb lever.
I don't believe that for a moment. Much more likely the complex machines could be simply disabled and their firmware wiped by remote management. This happens with other stuff too, you can't even stealthily move it, because of embedded GPS and the like.
edit: Apart from that, what would that stupid act do to the economy of the involved parties, and the world in general?
It's all interwoven.
Fuck it all, and great reset, or what?