Intel chief Pat Gelsinger: Too many chips made in Asia

The catch is there is a world of difference between what is in written form and operational practice, and yet another world of difference in operational practice at scale. Most of what is unwritten in civilization are operational practice, and doing so at scale; most of that is encoded behind commercial enterprises' walled gardens of information.

As a concrete example, figure out what it would take to reconstruct the melt blown material manufacturing equipment. Or what it would take to construct an MDX lab. Or "just" a machine shop like Fireball Tools' capabilities. That kind of knowledge is extremely slow to percolate into an information transmissible form, if it ever makes it there. We don't have mind state capture and replay, unfortunately.

There is lots of material on an even "lower" tech base-oriented activity, small-scale farming and/or ranching. And out of the tens of thousands of people in the developed world every year who want to take the plunge to grow their own food, there is insufficient "cookbook" recipes they can follow to enable them to easily do so, and of the many who do take the plunge, most do not stick it out past five years.

People get a taste of this dynamic anytime they venture into hobbies that require some form of self-sufficiency, like hiking, camping, blue water sailing, and so on. The logistical tail to support those activities to where they can "launch" is quite extensive.

I agree infrastructure-damaging incidents are extremely unlikely to uniformly take out all supply chains across the board. But planning-wise, there is no way to tell which parts of infrastructure would be adversely affected. The best we have been able to do as a species is to route around the damage on a best effort basis, relying upon the diversity/redundancy of sourcing and logistical alternatives, like with the COVID-19 pandemic and the Suez Canal backlog.

As a "DR plan for civilization" posture however, that is insufficient. Like Microsoft Word, such a planner has to cater to lots of different scenarios (users), each with its own unique set of induced infrastructure gaps (requirements), ending up with a Franken-plan (Microsoft Word). It's not an easy or compact problem to solve as far as I can tell, though I'd be happy to be shown wrong. If we ever want to make off-world settlement a reality in the far future, then we have to solve this problem to some degree.

The thought has occurred to me that making such a plan too compact holds within it a dark pattern: if it is too accessible to too-small an entity, then it encourages elites with sufficient resources and megalomania to pursue their own ideations of a world created in their own image. I suspect without humaniform robots and GAI however, that won't become a possible reality. I believe the scale and complexity of mind states to transfer around (densities of which are limited by human lifespans and in the base case, available energy) to accomplish the goal dictates pretty large population requirements out of reach of all but combinations of developed-world nation-states.

It isn't all dire. We've solved this before, up to around the 17-18th century, arguably tapering off the competence around the 19th century. We haven't dusted off the outdated DR plan and updated it for our new "platform".