A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing
We don’t hear enough stories about humanity working together these days. So here’s a small example. Very small. Well, the output is often small, but the process is enormous and spread across the globe. “There are a handful of truly monumental collective achievements in our history: Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of Giza, and perhaps, if we’re being generous, the Roman aqueducts. Modern global civilization has made one contribution to this eternal pantheon. It is not the moon landing. It is the semiconductor supply chain. This strikes almost all of us as ridiculous. A microchip is a bauble of metal and refined sand. It doesn’t appear to have epic proportions. Upon close examination, however, the epic proportions are there in miniature. Imagine a perfect replica of a sprawling metropolis, a Tokyo or a São Paulo, engraved at atomic dimensions on a tile the size of a fingernail. The urban details would be faithfully rendered to the last golf ball or egg—each reduced to approximately the bulk of a hemoglobin molecule, or the distance grown by a human fingernail every five seconds. If a chip were merely a sculpture, this chiselling would represent a considerable achievement. But a chip is, in fact, a functional city for a population of busy electrons.” Some are enabling you to read this right now. There could be about 2,000 of them in your car. Even things that seem much bigger and bolder among our human achievements require them to run. They are at the core of the industry that is essentially propping up our entire economy. “If basic chips grow scarce, it will not be long before the average homeowner cannot afford a dishwasher, let alone a phone. If the A.I. backlash seems fervent now, just wait until the dishes pile up. But the financial interests pale in comparison with the geopolitical ones.” In short, all our chips are on the table, and that means everything else is, too. Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker: Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made (Alt link). I would have guessed that accolade belonged to the Tater Tot. But even that remarkable invention and manufacturing process can be handled by one company called Ore-Ida. It takes a big machine to deploy these little cogs. “The global semiconductor supply chain … has united its participants in the pursuit of something profoundly difficult that could not have been achieved in the absence of intercontinental solidarity.” That’s what makes them great. That’s what makes their manufacturing and movements so precarious; it takes a lot of big elements to make these tiny products.
+ Scheduling Note: NextDraft will be off for the next couple days.
