And so advanced semiconductors today have millions or often billions of these tiny circuits etched into them that provide the 1’s and 0’s that modern computing requires. And all of the 1’s and 0’s that undergird all of software, all of data storage, it’s just circuits turning on or off to produce the right digit.Īnd today, we have lots of digits we require because we store and process lots of data. And when a circuit is on, it produces a 1. And these circuits are either completed or interrupted via a device called a transistor, which is a switch, basically, that turns them on or off. So a chip is a piece of silicon with a lot of tiny circuits carved into it. So you often describe it as providing the processing power of the modern world. I don’t know if this will be a hard question or an easy question for you, but like most people, and particularly before I read the book, I have only the hazy idea of what a semiconductor chip actually does. And so the modern economy just can’t function without lots and lots of chips.
#MISSING POCKET CIRCUIT RACER PARTS FULL#
All of our devices are full of chips that do computing and do sensing, increasingly do communication. So a new car will have a thousand chips inside of it, your refrigerator, your microwave, your dishwasher. We think of chips as being in smartphones or being in P.C.s, but today, they’re in almost any device with an on/off switch. Well, today, people like you and me can’t live our lives without touching hundreds or thousands of chips just going about the course of our daily lives. You write that we rarely think about chips, yet they’ve created the modern world. So let’s talk a bit about why semiconductors end up mattering this much. Well, I started researching it around 2015, 2016, didn’t start writing until 2020, and finished writing early 2022 just as the chip shortage was reaching its peak. I assume - when did you actually start it? Because I honestly cannot imagine a better moment for it to have come out. As always, my email: PLAYING]Ĭhris Miller, welcome to the show. But I do think this show is one of the more important we’re going to do - and important for understanding a lot of the other shows we’re going to do - because this is getting at a material reality that is easy to miss but is going to shape so many of the big stories we’re living through in the coming years. And there’s a lot more in the book than I’m able to cover in the show. And having read it now, definitely going to be on my year-end list of the most important books I read in 2023.
It was a “Financial Times” Business Book of the Year in 2022. So “Chip War,” which is just amazingly timed, given how deep it is, is a history of semiconductors as a technology, as an industry, and then it traces the way they have and are shaping geopolitics. Whoever controls semiconductors controls the future.Īnd it turns out, for reasons I didn’t really understand until I read Chris Miller’s book “Chip War,” that semiconductors really can be controlled. In the same way that you couldn’t understand geopolitics in the 20th century without understanding oil and other forms of energy - where it was, and who had it, and who needed it, and what they would do to get it - you can’t understand the major stories of the 21st century without understanding semiconductors. They are both stories driven by semiconductors and who controls them. But they also connect in another, more tangible way. and China to get the strongest and earliest A.I. There’s a geopolitics of who controls A.I., a race between the U.S. When I imagine the history books getting written of our era, it is very hard for me not to imagine these being dominant themes.Īnd these stories connect. I’m not going to try to rank order what matters most in the world, but these are two good contenders for the top five, at least. So you may have noticed at the beginning of the year the two themes are really dominating the show - China and A.I. Transcript The Most Amazing - and Dangerous - Technology in the World The historian Chris Miller explains how semiconductors touch every corner of modern life - and the geopolitics of manufacturing them.
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