Three more books about the technology wars

Since I’ve been writing a lot about?industrial competition ?between China and the developed democracies, I decided to read some books about the technological aspects of this rivalry. The first three I read were?Chip War,?Wireless Wars, and?AI Superpowers, which I reviewed in an earlier post:

I’m basically working off of?the list of “key technologies” ?identified by the Special Competitive Studies Project, a think tank founded and chaired by Eric Schmidt:

I decided to start with the technologies that are the most highly contested — semiconductors, AI, and networking technology. In the future, I’ll try to find books to read about competition in drones and quantum computing and advanced manufacturing, but for now I’ve maintained the same focus as in my first post.

First a bit of a recap. Semiconductors are really the fundamental underlying technology here, as?Chip Wars?explains. They’re crucial for precision weaponry, but they also underlie all the other key contested technologies — wireless networking technology relies on chips that switch between data streams, and AI relies on chips like GPUs and ASICs. Take away chips, and you can’t really do anything. So this is why?U.S. export controls ?have focused on the semiconductor industry, and why China is trying so hard to catch up.

Wireless dominance is defined just as much by more than just technological capabilities; since there’s such a strong network effect, whichever provider can underbid everyone else typically gets to be the sole provider for everything. And in the past decade, that has been the Chinese juggernaut Huawei, which has used Chinese government assistance to underbid (and in some cases, destroy) its Western rivals. As?Wireless Wars?explains, one way to prevent that might be to move to an open system where different providers provide different pieces of wireless tech, allowing America to compete more effectively against China. But open-RAN technology, as it’s called, is still technically challenging.

AI, meanwhile, is the wild card; as we’ve vividly seen with GPT-4 in the past few days, nobody really knows where this fast-progressing field is headed. So who will end up dominating it, or whether it even can be dominated, or what that would mean, is still up in the air. That said, however,?AI Superpowers?did a remarkably bad job of dealing with the topic — stubbornly avoiding any talk of military applications, and making a bunch of bad predictions about AI that have already been falsified by events.

Anyway, here are some brief reviews of the next three books.

1. “The Wires of War ”, by Jacob Helberg

If you’re going to follow in my footsteps and read these books,?The Wires of War?is the book you should probably read first. It gives a rapid but informative overview of all of the subjects covered in the others. But more importantly, it explains?why?the developed democracies should be engaging in technological competition with China in the first place. This is the “why we fight” book.

It can be very easy to just assume that the U.S. and our democratic allies ought to try to maintain technological supremacy over China. For many, U.S. hegemony is an end unto itself; for others, the fact that the Chinese Communist Party is a nasty regime that does nasty things to its people is reason enough that we shouldn’t want them to be the world’s dominant power. But for many people in the U.S., those reasons aren’t worth the higher consumer prices and loss of the Chinese market that will result from technological competition, not to mention the taxes needed to fund industrial policies.

The Wires of War?explains that the threat isn’t just to U.S. power or China’s oppressed minorities. China and?its key ally ?Russia bear active enmity toward the developed democracies, and even now are hitting the U.S. and its allies with cyberattacks and information operations that, although they fall short of actual war, are clearly hostile acts. Maintaining a lead in chips, AI, and networking technology is important for self-defense — especially if the low-level attacks escalate at some point.

Now, it’s true that Russia has been far more aggressive toward the U.S. and Europe than China has. If?The Wires of War?has a weakness, it’s that it starts out by mostly describing attacks by Russia, and then pivots to arguing that we need to reorient policy toward competition with China. The argument that we should prioritize competition with our most?capable?rival instead of our most?aggressive?rival — which I strongly agree with — requires a nuanced and holistic understanding of geopolitics that the book doesn’t always provide. But overall it does make its case pretty strongly; I expected to find this book overly hawkish, but I found myself nodding along to pretty much everything.