AI is working its way into just about every aspect of modern life. I mean, who didn’t fall for that video of the bunnies jumping on the trampoline. But artificial intelligence might not be the game-changer in warfare that you think it is…at least not in the short term.
AI promises faster processing, targeting, and decision-making, which all sounds great, until you throw in the wrench of deglobalization. As the globalized world collapses, the semiconductor supply chain will fall apart. The most advanced chips will not be able to be created anymore. Between the bottlenecks of EUV lithography and the countless single points of failure, we’ll be stuck with what we currently have (or yesterday’s tech).
When you factor this into military applications, it means older systems like cruise missiles and smart bombs will be mainstays. Fully AI-enabled systems will be severely constrained and reserved for the really important stuff.
Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here come to you from Cassidy arch. And where am I? Capitol reef National park. Sorry, it’s been a busy week. Today we are going to close out the series on the revolution in military technology. As advances in automation and digitization in materials science and energy transfer come together to remake how we fight.
And we’re going to close out with something that you probably don’t need to worry about. And that’s artificial intelligence in war. The whole idea of AI is it can process faster than we can’t make decisions faster than we can, and potentially target with lethality faster than we can.
I don’t think it’s going to happen. The problem is that the semiconductor supply chain for the high end chips that are capable of doing AI, and as a rule here, the cutting edge is going to be three nanometers and smaller, simply isn’t going to be able to survive the globalization age. So any chips that are not made in the next relatively short period of time, no more than a single digit of years, are really all we’re going to have for a good long time.
And that means that the machines that are going out and doing the fighting have to rely on something that is older, that is not capable of processing and has to be linked back to something back home, either via wire or telemetry or some sort of radio communication. And that makes for a very different sort of beast.
There are roughly 30,000 manufacturing supply chain steps that go into semiconductors. The high end stuff. And there’s about 9000 companies involved, and about half of those companies only make one product for one end user. There’s literally thousands of single point failures, and it only takes a few of them to go offline for you to not be able to make the high end chips at all.
But the place that I think it’s going to be most concentrated, the place where we’re all going to feel like the place where is going to be obvious is going to be with the lithography. Specifically, we are currently using something called extreme ultraviolet, which is done by a company called ASML out of the Netherlands. And they are the world leaders in all of this.
There are other companies that do the fabs other than TSMC and Taiwan, but the lithography can really only be done by the Dutch. And it’s not like this is one company. This is a constellation of hundreds of companies, and every time one of them either has a generational change or goes public, ASML basically sweeps them under the rug, absorbs them completely, puts the staff in different areas and puts it all under referential lockdown so there is no way to duplicate what they have.
And so if you take this gangly supply chain that wraps the whole world and any part of that breaks, we can’t do EUV at all. And that means functionally, no chips that are worse than or better than six or 7 or 8 nanometers based on where you draw the line, we can still do something called deep ultraviolet, but extreme ultraviolet.
It just becomes impossible. And that means that the best chips that we will have ten years from now are going to be very similar to the best chips we had ten years ago. And that limits what we can do with any sort of technological innovation. For the purposes of the military, it becomes very, very truncated. Old weapons like smart bombs and cruise missiles actually don’t use very sophisticated chips.
20 year old chips are just fine. It’s the high end, the thinking, the processing, anything that’s more than guidance and requires a degree of decision making, that is what’s going to be off the table. So while I applaud all of us for having these conversations about the implications of AI, what it means for the workforce, what it means for culture, what it means for morality and legality.
These are great conversations. It’s very rare that we get ahead of the technology in discussing what it can and can’t do, and start thinking about the implications for us as people, but I think we have some extra time because once this breaks, it’s going to take us 15 to 20 years to rebuild it. And that was back before everything accelerated with the Chinese fall and the Trump administration.
Now it’s probably going to take longer. So have these discussions. I think that’s great. But it’s really probably going to be a problem for the 2050s.
