Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

AMD uses GlobalFoundries.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries ) The firm manufactures integrated circuits in high volume mostly for semiconductor companies such as AMD, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and STMicroelectronics. It has five 200 mm wafer fabrication plants in Singapore, one 300 mm fabrication plant in each of Germany and Singapore, and three fabrication plants in the United States: one 200 mm fabrication plant in Vermont (where it is the largest private employer) and two 300 mm fabrication plants in New York.

Fab 8, located in Luther Forest Technology Campus, Saratoga County, New York, United States is a new 300 mm fab. This fabrication plant was constructed by GF as a green field fab for advanced technologies. It is capable of manufacturing 14 nm node technology. The plant's construction began in July 2009 and the company started mass production in 2012.[5][10] It has a maximum manufacturing capacity of 60,000 of 300 mm wafers/month, or the equivalent of over 135,000 of 200 mm wafers/month. In September 2016, GlobalFoundries announced it would make a multibillion-dollar investment to refit Fab 8 to produce 7 nm FinFET parts starting in the second half of 2018.[11] The process is planned to initially use deep ultraviolet lithography, and eventually transition to extreme ultraviolet lithography.[12] Technology: 28 nm and 14 nm. 7 nm planned.

Fab 9,[13] located in the village of Essex Junction, Vermont, United States, near Vermont's largest city of Burlington, became part of GlobalFoundries operations with the acquisition of IBM Microelectronics. The fab manufactures technologies down to the 90 nm node and is the largest private employer within the state of Vermont. The site also hosts a captive mask shop, with development efforts down to the 7 nanometer node.

They are building a fab in China, but not for AMD stuff.

( http://www.anandtech.com/show/11117/globalfoundries-to-expan... )

GlobalFoundries operates 10 fabs worldwide with four of them processing 300 mm wafers. The company’s most advanced fab is the Fab 8 located in Luther Forest Technology Campus (Saratoga County, New York) where the chipmaker produces flagship processors for AMD and some other leading developers of chips. To keep the Fab 8 up-to-date, GlobalFoundries spends billions of dollars on development of new manufacturing technologies and production equipment. Back in September, the company already announced plans to invest several billion in new tools to produce ICs (integrated circuits) using its 7 nm fabrication process and this week GlobalFoundries said it would invest in the expansion of the Fab 8’s manufacturing capacity.

Also, re: the Intel-using sites in the Top500 (the vast majority are using Intel or AMD processors, see https://www.top500.org/statistics/list/ ) those are largely made in the USA too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...

Yeah sure you might find low hanging fruit and get free increases in "performance" by 10%-30% and bugfixes by simply optimizing the turing machine without any tradeoffs but most of the value is in optimizing the programs and data that are available to the machine. The best part: It doesn't require any modification to the turing machine, the effects appear very quickly within roughly two decades after birth and very often they can be upgraded later which means we don't have to deal with obsolete or buggy turing machines and even if they installed a suboptimal program and can't or don't want to remove it then next generation will still install new programs from a clean slate which is still more desirable than turing machine optimization that requires multiple generations to take effect. Heck by the time the turing machine optimization becomes available it might not even be optimal anymore because it was based around our needs X generations ago instead of what we need now.

People care about many things. But if they get one good thing like intelligence without losing others, they will go for it.

In China, they do not have religious reasons against improving humans. And parents rely on kids to take care of them when they are old. Intelligence often predicts earnings. So if it's safe, they will do it.

Well, not quite in that way. Survival of the fittest doesn't literally mean 'survival of those with the most physical strength'. It means survival of those most well adapted to their environment, intelligence included.

And evolution hasn't effectively halted either. It's hard to tell that sure (because evolution on a massively noticeable level is a slow process and human history is short) but the whole process of genetic mutations arising and people doing better because those mutations make them slightly better for their environment is still going on.

And the traits selected for aren't random nor a crapshoot, they're just kind of overshadowed by social situations and hierarchies. If there were two kids from the exact same background and one was 'more intelligent' than the other, the more intelligent one might do better. But it's very rarely that simple in society now.

> it's inevitable that we also learn to control our own evolution.

The problem here is the pronoun "we" and "our". It isn't "we" who are going to control evolution. It is a select group of wealthy elites.

Also, just because china and russia might do it doesn't mean that we necessarily should do it. After all, the pioneers of illegal human experimentation was the US and britain but most of the world didn't follow along.

I agree with you that genetic engineering ( controlled evolution? ) is inevitable. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the ethical concerns and other such pitfalls.