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MP

This is a special post for quick takes by MP. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

It really helps to think about the world as if people were rational working under full information.

It really makes sense for China to invade Taiwan as soon as this summer.

1- China won't be able to win the long timelines world many policymakers are planning for. The David Sacks/Jensen Hwang argument is that by precluding China from the best AI accelerators, they'll eventually have their own domestic supply the U.S. can't control. When that happens, the U.S. will have a robot army they can cheaply deploy to defend the Taiwan strait.

2- Taiwan is really central for U.S. AI development. Really. Not only TSMC, but Micron, Mediatek, Alchip, all the ODMs like Foxconn.

3- China needs to really consider the possibility of recursive self-improvement. Waiting one year means another $500B in AI equipament for AI Labs.

4- The governance of the CCP over China is not guaranteed under a strong AI world.

5- Trumpism might be gone at the end of the decade and president Gavin Newsom might be much more willing to fight over Taiwan.

1artemium10mo

In my opinion, it doesn't make rational sense for them to invade at all. Even in the best-case scenario for China, where they manage to pacify Taiwan after a tough fight, I would still expect the following: 1) They would be permanently shut out of all Western trade and technology sharing. 2) All critical semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan will be destroyed by the US or the local Taiwanese military before China can get to it, and most of it is already in the process of being successfully transferred to the US. I also expect that most of the human talent would be taken to the US. 3) Even if the US did not directly intervene, the US and their allies would start massive rearmament and reindustrialisation programmes and maximally utilise their advantage in AI and other critical technologies in future. 4) Regarding point 4, if American AI victory is inevitable due to their computing advantage, China might still get a better deal in the current scenario, where it is perceived as merely an economic competitor and geopolitical challenger, rather than a direct adversary, as it would be in the event of an invasion of Taiwan. There are also some indications that Taiwanese politics are slowly moving in a pro-China direction, with increased support for peaceful re-unification among younger KMT voters, which might also incentivise China to bide its time and avoid doing anything reckless.

Thank you for replying.

They would be permanently shut out of all Western trade and technology sharing.

That's not true. Many countries um the West were literally fascists during WWII. I can totally imagine worlds where China and the West get along after that.

All critical semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan will be destroyed by the US or the local Taiwanese military before China can get to it, and most of it is already in the process of being successfully transferred to the US. I also expect that most of the human talent would be taken to the US.

Why ... (read more)

5lilkim202510mo

This only tracks under the assumption that militarily useful AI's development will be dependent upon compute, that it will arrive before China catches up in terms of semiconductor production, and that, once it comes to exist, it will be difficult to cheaply replicate. I think a majority of non-Western world leaders don't expect any of those three things to be true. Whether or not you agree with them, that's a useful point of information for modeling their behavior. As best I can tell, China sees the massive investment in training frontier LLMs to essentially be a waste of money. They'll replicate the models from six months to a year ago just in case, since it's cheap enough to do so and having them around for prestige has some value, but they don't expect them to be the wonder-weapon that some in the U.S. expect them to be. Likewise, Russia has far fewer people on hand, and seems to prefer allocating their best researchers towards more conventional work (e.g. hypersonic missiles). Essentially, the East is gambling that AGI happens later or more unconventionally, and, in that scenario, the West is just helpfully providing them with free as-good-as-open-source R&D. [...] This seems incredibly implausible on multiple fronts. * "Trumpism" is just the rise in nationalism in the West that's been going on since 2012 at the latest and shows no signs of slowing down. Motivated people have been predicting that "Trumpism will disappear by next year" since Trump first walked down the elevator. * Right-wing politicians are almost always more China-hawkish than left-wing ones. In any case, in a major war, they enjoy a much greater degree of faith from the pipe-hitters, which imposes a practical constraint on hawkishness.