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Notes -
Yeah, I guess my mental model of US strategic planning is that IF China is going to commit such a massive defection as to seize TSMC by force, THEN we'd much rather no one have it than that China has it and can decide who is allowed to use it and on what terms. The US has struck a major blow against China recently with our semiconductor export restrictions, basically revealing that our goal is to permanently constrain China's advancement into modern ML tech, and I can't imagine that we'd allow China to reverse the gradient of that dynamic through the use of military force. I think we're past the point where we look at China as just another economic player with whom we can achieve a win-win, and we're now well into the politics of great power rivalry, at least with respect to high-powered machine learning chips.
Would destroying TSMC be suicidal? No -- we'd survive without it. We wouldn't have as many nice things for the next ten years, and we'd probably set back our AGI timeline by 5-10 years, and I don't mean to downplay those concerns, but preventing China from pulling even or ahead of the US in this strategic tech frontier is probably an order of magnitude more important by our policymakers' values. IMO.
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