The singularity can not happen without China's permission. The reason for this is because China manufactures everything, and the rest of the world can not manufacture anything without China's permission. If you wanted a robotics led (industrial) singularity then China gets a veto over you building those robots in the first place.
I have noticed that for a great many people in the west this post will make a claim that will demand quite a profound reorientation of basic global economic reality. There may be some resistance to this, but a good way to describe it is this: there's a black hole on this earth. This is an economic black hole, a manufacturing black hole which sucks in the entire rest of earth into its production orbit. Without this black hole we can not sustain a modern livelihood as the rest of earth mines energy from this black hole as one would do. This black hole is the largest industrial state that has ever existed in human history and hence the most powerful state in an absolute sense that has ever existed in human industry. I.e., it would be able to produce the most amount of kinetic force, ever.
This black hole is China.
This black hole is so powerful that the USA has no hard power unless China continues giving it implicit permission to have hard power.
But how could that even be?
"Surely we can manufacture the bullets in our weapons without China?"
And the answer is no. Without China we can not manufacture the bullets for the weapons we would shoot at China in a war with China, or missiles, or drones, or tanks, or fighter jets or.. or... Nor can we manufacture our AI datacenters. And anyone who has looked at supply chains at all, including e.g., Elon Musk or Tim Cook, know these realities to be obvious to a degree they don't mind having to kiss the ring of Xi Jinping regularly. Everything I write about below is common knowledge in the supply chain communities.
There will be three parts to the argument
1. First I will show you how China builds at least halfof all the things (!) in the entire world
2. Then I will show you how all the other things other nations build depends entirely on China. Giving China effectively industrial escalation dominance.
3. Lastly I will argue that it will take at least decades to build an industrial supply chain independent of China with just humans. Which will lead to my final claim: a material singularity can not happen over short time frames without China's permission.
All of this should be very well sourced, I can't do that because that would take me too much time as these figures and numbers live mostly in my head, but I can assure all of you that what I am saying is correct enough and I would be very happy if someone was motivated by this post to look into any of this themselves. It's not too hard to verify these claims, so I motivate anyone to verify them. The basic gist/directionality of the facts here are correct. I will give some sources for some things.
Without China We Can Wear Only One Shoe: How China Makes Half of All The Stuff
In Magical-Thinking "Value Added" manufacturing accounting. China still is 32% of the world, larger than USA, Japan, Germany and South Korea combined.
I don't want to go too much into why I believe this to be magical thinking accounting as it's a 100 page document to do so but the basic accounting fiction that is being done here is e.g., an american car has supposedly 2-3x more 'value add' than a car made in China, even though a Chinese car is at least equal or greater than an american car in quality (probably greater nowadays) for a much cheaper price. I also will note that an American car could not even be built without Chinese parts, whereas a Chinese car can be built with only Chinese parts. But more on that later.
Imagine however that these numbers were real, and then let's look at the chart anyway for a moment:
In the 'we made up numbers world to feel better about ourselves'. China does as much manufacturing as all of the developed democracies combined.
Let's now look at some actual production figures however, and let's not just compare China to only developed democracies, but the entire rest of earth.
China produces:
80% of all drones on earth 89% of all laptops on earth 40% of all cars (with capacity to double or triple iirc) 56% of all ships 62% of all bicycles 60% of all steel 61% of all electrical transformers 45% of all refined copper 82% of all air conditioners 67% of all pig iron 60% of all aluminium 64% of all smartphones 49% of all cement 52% of all textiles 50-65% of all electric motors 70-80% of all lithion ion batteries 50-60% of all home appliances 50-55% of all footwear 80-85% of all solar modules 46% of all chemicals 30-40% of all specialty chemicals
Source (various internet things, rough numbers I have in my head). All of this is correct enough and can be verified by yourself online using e.g., US/EU government sources. It's maybe 10% less, or 10% more, that would be my 90% CI for the above numbers.
Okay so China builds at least half of all the things. So what? Don't you see that the other 7 billion people on this earth produce about as much as the 1.3bn in China? That's not too bad right, if we all get together surely we can bootstrap an industrial singularity?
But what if China is the only complete industrial supply chain on this earth, and everyone else has to borrow from China's manufacturing capacity to build anything?
Without China we Actually have No Shoes: China's Upstream Industrial Dominance
It's not just rare earths, it's everything upstream. China’s industrial leverage gets larger (infinite for time periods <25 yrs-ish imv) as you move upstream.
A finished product might be only 10% “Chinese” by value, or might even carry a “Made in USA” label. But if one irreplaceable $50 component or chemical comes from China, the whole $5 million system can still be dependent on China. This is of course true for every weapon manufactured in the USA:
You need these things to build many complex things, including advanced lithography machines. To build many many complex things in this world you need to refine rare earths, and china refines 91% of it
The USA has tried for years now to fix like trying to mine and refine like one tiny rare earth metal somewhere, and it can not do so really at all and definitely not at any meaningful scale. Industrial organisation is hard and the USA can't do it well anymore (see e.g., failing to build basic infrastructure)
But it's also true, for just everything else upstream.Anyone that has ever build something in the world knows the first thing they ask themselves is "what city in China do I have to go to?" and then when you go to the city that makes all of the guitars in the world the Chinese in that city ask themselves the question 'what city in China do I go to for the refined materials to make all of the guitars in the world?'
I urge anyone deeply interested to just look at where supply chains actually begin and also practically end (China) except for a few things such as airplanes and the highest end semiconductors. And there is no friendshoring either. There is no made in Vietnam. There's only, Chinese firms assembling in vietnam/asean/wherever while China continues to strategically keep a chokehold on all strategic industrial things they have monopolized (which is roughly everything you need for a modern economy); for explicit natsec strategic reasons outlined in very long-term visions.
But here's a more high level argument instead as well as to why it's a generational effort to rebuild this capacity in the USA: when you lose industry you lose expertise and once you have lost expertise it takes decades of retraining your population to have it again
When the USA deindustrialized it lost all of this.
You can't work in a field that doesn't exist in your country.
If you really wanted to get serious about reindustrializing the USA, you would need to train new generations (over generations) of scientists and engineers doing different things from what they are doing now (tech and finance). And we are not serious about it.
Okay but the superhuman robots will just do it infinitely quickly, or something?
On priors it took 1.3 billion Chinese 100 years to build the industrial state that is China. Okay but robots don't have to sleep, so we'll cut it by 3.
Can the robots then build it in 33 years? I mean, once you have 1.3bn robots. I bet they can? Probably even faster.
But China gets to veto you building 1.3bn robots in the first place, because it makes half of all the things in this world and has a monopoly on upstream supply chains. It has industrial escalation dominance. China also would veto this because it's not in their interest to have american GDP grow by 10-100% a year and the USA making a superhuman army billions robots that can take over the world.
So it will need to be mostly humans (americans + allies, most likely) building a complete industrian chain to finally kick off self-sustaining industrial singularity. I'm sure the population of the United States is thrilled that hundreds of mines and hundreds of refining plants, and hundreds of electromotor, magnet, factories and hundreds of.. etc. will be reopened in their neighborhoods. Even if they are happy to do so, it's at least a 25 year effort to becoming a self-sustaining industrial nation again (USA once was!). And then we can build robots without China and then the industrial robotic singularity can take off and then it can grow as quickly as written in AI2027.
The Chinese furthermore, are well aware of the fact that they have industrial escalation dominance. This is how they view the world and it's an explicit policy that goes back since the founding of the PRC. It's their primary mission to have industrial escalation dominance, as they believe that industrial dominance is the only way to real power and hence the only way to restore the righteous place of China in the world as the foremost superpower. They are right about this. And because they understand this, once robots are starting to build robots in the USA. They will veto it. For the same reasons they may not veto the singularity happening inside of China.
The singularity can not happen without China's permission. The reason for this is because China manufactures everything, and the rest of the world can not manufacture anything without China's permission. If you wanted a robotics led (industrial) singularity then China gets a veto over you building those robots in the first place.
I have noticed that for a great many people in the west this post will make a claim that will demand quite a profound reorientation of basic global economic reality. There may be some resistance to this, but a good way to describe it is this: there's a black hole on this earth. This is an economic black hole, a manufacturing black hole which sucks in the entire rest of earth into its production orbit. Without this black hole we can not sustain a modern livelihood as the rest of earth mines energy from this black hole as one would do. This black hole is the largest industrial state that has ever existed in human history and hence the most powerful state in an absolute sense that has ever existed in human industry. I.e., it would be able to produce the most amount of kinetic force, ever.
This black hole is China.
This black hole is so powerful that the USA has no hard power unless China continues giving it implicit permission to have hard power.
But how could that even be?
"Surely we can manufacture the bullets in our weapons without China?"
And the answer is no. Without China we can not manufacture the bullets for the weapons we would shoot at China in a war with China, or missiles, or drones, or tanks, or fighter jets or.. or... Nor can we manufacture our AI datacenters. And anyone who has looked at supply chains at all, including e.g., Elon Musk or Tim Cook, know these realities to be obvious to a degree they don't mind having to kiss the ring of Xi Jinping regularly. Everything I write about below is common knowledge in the supply chain communities.
There will be three parts to the argument
1. First I will show you how China builds at least half of all the things (!) in the entire world
2. Then I will show you how all the other things other nations build depends entirely on China. Giving China effectively industrial escalation dominance.
3. Lastly I will argue that it will take at least decades to build an industrial supply chain independent of China with just humans. Which will lead to my final claim: a material singularity can not happen over short time frames without China's permission.
All of this should be very well sourced, I can't do that because that would take me too much time as these figures and numbers live mostly in my head, but I can assure all of you that what I am saying is correct enough and I would be very happy if someone was motivated by this post to look into any of this themselves. It's not too hard to verify these claims, so I motivate anyone to verify them. The basic gist/directionality of the facts here are correct. I will give some sources for some things.
Without China We Can Wear Only One Shoe: How China Makes Half of All The Stuff
In Magical-Thinking "Value Added" manufacturing accounting. China still is 32% of the world, larger than USA, Japan, Germany and South Korea combined.
I don't want to go too much into why I believe this to be magical thinking accounting as it's a 100 page document to do so but the basic accounting fiction that is being done here is e.g., an american car has supposedly 2-3x more 'value add' than a car made in China, even though a Chinese car is at least equal or greater than an american car in quality (probably greater nowadays) for a much cheaper price. I also will note that an American car could not even be built without Chinese parts, whereas a Chinese car can be built with only Chinese parts. But more on that later.
Imagine however that these numbers were real, and then let's look at the chart anyway for a moment:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/2023-is-when-the-empires-strike-back
In the 'we made up numbers world to feel better about ourselves'. China does as much manufacturing as all of the developed democracies combined.
Let's now look at some actual production figures however, and let's not just compare China to only developed democracies, but the entire rest of earth.
China produces:
80% of all drones on earth
89% of all laptops on earth
40% of all cars (with capacity to double or triple iirc)
56% of all ships
62% of all bicycles
60% of all steel
61% of all electrical transformers
45% of all refined copper
82% of all air conditioners
67% of all pig iron
60% of all aluminium
64% of all smartphones
49% of all cement
52% of all textiles
50-65% of all electric motors
70-80% of all lithion ion batteries
50-60% of all home appliances
50-55% of all footwear
80-85% of all solar modules
46% of all chemicals
30-40% of all specialty chemicals
Source (various internet things, rough numbers I have in my head). All of this is correct enough and can be verified by yourself online using e.g., US/EU government sources. It's maybe 10% less, or 10% more, that would be my 90% CI for the above numbers.
Okay so China builds at least half of all the things. So what? Don't you see that the other 7 billion people on this earth produce about as much as the 1.3bn in China? That's not too bad right, if we all get together surely we can bootstrap an industrial singularity?
But what if China is the only complete industrial supply chain on this earth, and everyone else has to borrow from China's manufacturing capacity to build anything?
Without China we Actually have No Shoes: China's Upstream Industrial Dominance
It's not just rare earths, it's everything upstream. China’s industrial leverage gets larger (infinite for time periods <25 yrs-ish imv) as you move upstream.
A finished product might be only 10% “Chinese” by value, or might even carry a “Made in USA” label. But if one irreplaceable $50 component or chemical comes from China, the whole $5 million system can still be dependent on China. This is of course true for every weapon manufactured in the USA:
For the entire "rare earths metal" category, China accounted in 2024 for about 60% of mining, 91% of refining, and 94% of sintered permanent-magnet production
You need these things to build many complex things, including advanced lithography machines. To build many many complex things in this world you need to refine rare earths, and china refines 91% of it
But can't we fix this? No.
The USA has tried for years now to fix like trying to mine and refine like one tiny rare earth metal somewhere, and it can not do so really at all and definitely not at any meaningful scale. Industrial organisation is hard and the USA can't do it well anymore (see e.g., failing to build basic infrastructure)
But it's also true, for just everything else upstream. Anyone that has ever build something in the world knows the first thing they ask themselves is "what city in China do I have to go to?" and then when you go to the city that makes all of the guitars in the world the Chinese in that city ask themselves the question 'what city in China do I go to for the refined materials to make all of the guitars in the world?'
Similarly, if you want to build any datacenters inside of the USA at all. You ask yourself: In what city in China do I have to go to
I urge anyone deeply interested to just look at where supply chains actually begin and also practically end (China) except for a few things such as airplanes and the highest end semiconductors. And there is no friendshoring either. There is no made in Vietnam. There's only, Chinese firms assembling in vietnam/asean/wherever while China continues to strategically keep a chokehold on all strategic industrial things they have monopolized (which is roughly everything you need for a modern economy); for explicit natsec strategic reasons outlined in very long-term visions.
But here's a more high level argument instead as well as to why it's a generational effort to rebuild this capacity in the USA: when you lose industry you lose expertise and once you have lost expertise it takes decades of retraining your population to have it again
When the USA deindustrialized it lost all of this.
Case in point. How many 130IQ+ people do you know work in rare-earths refining in the USA? How many Rare-Earths refining PhD's are there in the USA? How many university programs offer this? I believe the number is around a zero in the USA. in China it's 39 and China has 12,000+ full-time rare-earth researchers across four major national-lab systems
You can't work in a field that doesn't exist in your country.
If you really wanted to get serious about reindustrializing the USA, you would need to train new generations (over generations) of scientists and engineers doing different things from what they are doing now (tech and finance). And we are not serious about it.
Okay but the superhuman robots will just do it infinitely quickly, or something?
On priors it took 1.3 billion Chinese 100 years to build the industrial state that is China. Okay but robots don't have to sleep, so we'll cut it by 3.
Can the robots then build it in 33 years? I mean, once you have 1.3bn robots. I bet they can? Probably even faster.
But China gets to veto you building 1.3bn robots in the first place, because it makes half of all the things in this world and has a monopoly on upstream supply chains. It has industrial escalation dominance. China also would veto this because it's not in their interest to have american GDP grow by 10-100% a year and the USA making a superhuman army billions robots that can take over the world.
So it will need to be mostly humans (americans + allies, most likely) building a complete industrian chain to finally kick off self-sustaining industrial singularity. I'm sure the population of the United States is thrilled that hundreds of mines and hundreds of refining plants, and hundreds of electromotor, magnet, factories and hundreds of.. etc. will be reopened in their neighborhoods. Even if they are happy to do so, it's at least a 25 year effort to becoming a self-sustaining industrial nation again (USA once was!). And then we can build robots without China and then the industrial robotic singularity can take off and then it can grow as quickly as written in AI2027.
The Chinese furthermore, are well aware of the fact that they have industrial escalation dominance. This is how they view the world and it's an explicit policy that goes back since the founding of the PRC. It's their primary mission to have industrial escalation dominance, as they believe that industrial dominance is the only way to real power and hence the only way to restore the righteous place of China in the world as the foremost superpower. They are right about this. And because they understand this, once robots are starting to build robots in the USA. They will veto it. For the same reasons they may not veto the singularity happening inside of China.