The United States and its allies are trying to deprive China of the ability to obtain advanced microchips by applying various tactics. Those tactics include pressuring advanced-chip designers and manufacturers not to supply China with chips or high-end lithography machinery or the components necessary to create them; and, most recently, to limit inbound investment in China that could facilitate China’s creation of advanced chips. The intent of these measures, the Biden administration claims, is narrow. It is specifically to deprive China of the ability to use high-end microchips to develop general artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that could enhance its ability to wage war.
In the US in the past, it has been Republican politicians who have advocated applying cost-benefit analyses to decide whether certain policies should be adopted in the areas of environmental protection and health. Those advocates should now lobby the government to apply a cost-benefit analysis to the policies intended to deprive China of the ability to obtain high-end chips.
The costs of imposing these restrictions are obvious. Those costs are: (1) they are likely to constrain global trade and, therefore, global economic growth; and (2) they increase hostility between China and the US.
In a less-antagonistic relationship, such as there was between the US and China only a decade ago, the development of advanced scientific equipment and methodologies would be partly cooperative and partly benign, if brutally competitive, the way chipmakers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices compete in the US. Science and technology developers in the US and China have in the past cooperated and shared information, for example, through published academic papers and collaborative research, and they still do, though less than before. The more the US tries to restrict cooperation and collaboration, and sharing as a danger to US security, the more it increases the level of hostility and impairs the progress of scientific and technological development. These are clear costs.
In the US in the past, it has been Republican politicians who have advocated applying cost-benefit analyses to decide whether certain policies should be adopted in the areas of environmental protection and health. Those advocates should now lobby the government to apply a cost-benefit analysis to the policies intended to deprive China of the ability to obtain high-end chips.
On the other side, what are the benefits of the restrictions the US is imposing? There are three claimed benefits, but all are at best chimerical. Remember that the Biden administration insists — somewhat disingenuously — that these restrictions are not intended to hamper China’s economy or development but only to protect US security by harming China’s ability to apply advanced AI to warfare.
First, they will make the US (and its allies) less dependent on China and thus increase their resilience. As the shortages of personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed, many essential items needed by the Western allies are only made in China. This — along with security concerns — is the argument for “derisking” (formerly “decoupling”). But as The Economist magazine notes, the “sprawl of tariffs, investment reviews and export controls” supposedly designed to protect US national security by containing China’s military might not have lessened trade links with China but only made them more “tangled and opaque”. The efforts at “friend-shoring” have led to countries supposedly more friendly to the West than China, like India, Mexico, and Vietnam, becoming “packaging hubs for what, in effect, remain Chinese goods”. Direct trade between the US and China has reduced substantially, but trade between China and packaging-hub countries has exploded. China still produces most of the essential inputs. One result is that ties between China and these “Western-friendly” countries are becoming closer — not, perhaps, a result expected nor desired by the US.
Second, they will hamper China’s ability to obtain, manufacture, or develop advanced microchips, thus slowing its AI development and ability to apply AI to war technology. But making it difficult for China to obtain advanced chips or equipment to manufacture them also provides a strong incentive for China to develop them independently. Because the fabrication of advanced chips — those that contain electric circuits with adjacent circuitry only a few nanometers apart — is a technology developed in slow increments over decades, it will be difficult for China to catch up quickly. But being deprived of access to the product provides a new incentive to accelerate that process domestically. Also, advanced chips are not necessarily needed to create advanced AI algorithms. Less-advanced chips may also be used, in combination or in more significant numbers, to achieve the same objective. China is working on that.
Third, it will impede China’s ability to use the most advanced AI in warfare. But just how effective can AI be in warfare? The world recently caught its breath over the prospects of AI because of ChatGPT, an algorithm trained on data from the internet to create an answer to a question that convincingly mimics intelligent human writing. This is extremely impressive but is not necessarily a giant leap in AI development. It may be a mistake to attribute to AI further leaps, such as the ability to displace human intelligence in warfare. A recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists by two national security experts proclaims, “War is messy. AI can’t handle it.” Managing the chaos of battle amid the “confusion typical of real-life wars” is well beyond the powers of AI at present. It is conceivable that future AI could be developed to manage this much better than it can now — if it ever can — but that may be many years in the future. By then, China will have developed the ability to manufacture its own chips that are as advanced as any other. So, America’s measures to hamper China’s near-to-midterm progress in this area may be ultimately futile.
To obtain these questionable benefits, the US and the world are bearing the cost of increasingly antagonistic relations between the US and China, increasing the risk of war. Is it worth it?
The author is a mathematician and economist with expertise in the finance, energy and sustainable-development fields. He is an adjunct associate professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
