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Notes -
China to begin inspecting ships in the Taiwan Strait.
This is one of the most provocative moves China's made in living memory and a potential precursor to war. On the old site, I wrote:
It remains to be seen how committed to this move China is. As for now, it's comparatively limited, to last only a couple days and not covering the southern and eastern approaches to Taiwan. It's even possible that some ambitious regional authority is doing this on his own (see: possible explanations for the weather balloon). But it's absolutely an escalation, and it is as representative of China nibbling like a silkworm as anything.
The easy thing would be for Taiwan to offer vigorous protests and do nothing, which is China's expectation. Doing that simply encourages China to do this more and more, though; soon it becomes a regular occurrence, then just the reality on the ground.
Is this the time for China to make its move? Its vassalization of Russia continues. But other less-covered stories are in progress: it's peeling away Saudi Arabia from American influence and recently achieved a diplomatic coup in getting Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore relations.
On the other hand, it still seems too early to me. American forces can more likely than not win in a (costly) fight. China's hope is probably for Taiwan to acquiesce; if challenged, I think it would back down. But this is exactly the type of situation that could spiral out of control.
For US national security and AGI arms race reasons, I hope the US military plan is that if China is about to conquer Taiwan, we first destroy all Taiwanese computer chip factories.
@ESYudkowsky would be happy
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Should they also kill all the people working there?
Trolley problems are fun, until they get real.
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Evacuating a few hundred or thousand high ranking semiconductor engineers would hardly stretch logistics.
Operation Paperclip 2.0.
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Perhaps set up a new govt in exile in Arizona? The island itself doesn't mean much.
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That is one way to stop AGI!
Slow it down for 3 months you mean. We've already seen software improvements that let people run 2021 state-of-the-art LLMS on a Macbook.
I'll take 2025 software on 2020 hardware over the opposite any day.
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