China's war machine is spinning up
Spies, Taiwan, drones. Plus, will "Willow" kill us?
What would President Joe Biden do with 38 days left in his presidency, if China blockaded Taiwan, or actually invaded? It’s a historical fact that what Joe Biden says and what he actually does are frequently in two different universes. So we don’t really know. China is either testing things, or running up to an invasion: every news outlet is reporting—not as the top story—the fact that China has amassed nearly 90 warships in the seas surrounding Taiwan, from the southernmost Japanese islands to the South China Sea. According to officials in Taiwan, it’s the largest deployment seen since 1996.
Many pundits speculate that China’s move is retaliation for Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s visit to Hawaii and Guam last week. But China is not linking the visit, and Lai’s phone call with Speaker Mike Johnson, to their current activity. In fact, there are no official reasons or announcements given for this activity at all.
China considers Taiwan to be its own territory, but the U.S. sells arms to Taiwan. Taiwan is also a major semiconductor supplier to the world, and part of many western company supply chains. A U.S. law passed in 1979 requires the United States to ensure Taiwan’s ability to defend itself. But in reality, without U.S. assurances of what we will do if actual fighting breaks out, the advantage is very much in China’s favor right now. The PRC has spent decades building its military capabilities, and operating in its own littoral waters, it would present a challenge even for the U.S. Navy—the mightiest navy on earth, and the second biggest air force in the world (only the U.S. Air Force is larger)—to defend Taiwan should China impose its will to take the island.
The incoming Trump administration’s bent toward isolationism might be a seam China could run through, so close to the transition. An outgoing and indecisive president might hesitate to commit American forces to something that the new president would not support. And China might have a bargaining chip to blunt Trump’s proposed tariffs if it decided to run some kind of blockage around Taiwan. Of course that would be an act of war, but not to China—and not to most of the world, as most nations do not recognize Taiwan as an independent nation.
It’s hard to say what China will do. But we do know they spy on us every chance they get. For years, Chinese firms have been buying up farmland near at least 19 U.S. military bases. From that land, they raise towers (purportedly for cellular communications), and it’s likely they gather a lot of signal intelligence, as well as video spying. From their mainland, they hack into critical U.S. infrastructure.
Wednesday, a Chinese man was arrested in San Francisco as he tried to board a flight to China. “This defendant allegedly flew a drone over a military base and took photos of the base's layout, which is against the law,” said United States Attorney Martin Estrada in a press release. “The security of our nation is of paramount importance and my office will continue to promote the safety of our nation’s military personnel and facilities.”
China has flown large balloons over U.S. territory, using American internet providers to manage and transmit intelligence data it collected. Chinese nationals frequently cross our southern border illegally, dumping their ID before entering the U.S., then applying for asylum status. Many simply disappear into our country. The Chinese government is able to keep track of its nationals while in the U.S. In China, the state rules everything—literally. Through cameras and apps, integrated systems track every citizen’s movements, purchases and actions. Even in America, Chinese nationals are not free from their mother country’s eyes and ears.
In 2023, two men were charged with operating an illegal overseas police station in Manhattan for the PRC. “The PRC, through its repressive security apparatus, established a secret physical presence in New York City to monitor and intimidate dissidents and those critical of its government,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “The PRC’s actions go far beyond the bounds of acceptable nation-state conduct. We will resolutely defend the freedoms of all those living in our country from the threat of authoritarian repression.”
China is well prepared to deal with American sentiments, media, and reaction to any move toward Taiwan. What China can’t predict is exactly how Americans will react. History shows we don’t take kindly to being manipulated or taken for granted. That might be what stays Beijing’s hand. But this is a dangerous time for the world, and it might be a “now or never” time. What I do know is we need to watch this much more closely for the next 38 days.
HOW WILLOW IT END? Something in the back of my mind tells me that Google has invented something that may end the world, at least for humanity. Talk about immanentizing the eschaton: the Willow quantum chip may be a giant breakthrough in computing power.
Not to get too far into the weeds, but Google claims that their new quantum chip solved a math benchmark that would take the world’s fastest supercomputers (Frontier at Oak Ridge National Labs currently has that title I believe) 10 septillion:
years to solve, and did it in 5 minutes. Said another way, our fastest classical physics supercomputers would take eight hundred seventy-seven quadrillion nine hundred trillion times longer than the age of the universe (conservatively stated) to solve a math problem that Willow did in 1/12th of an hour.
More than that: the bigger the array of qubits (that’s the basic unit of quantum processing), the more accurate Willow gets. This is the first machine that has claimed to solve the “error problem” that’s plagued quantum computing platforms, because the bigger a quantum set gets, the more it approaches “classical” physics, meaning you lose the special quantum theory effects used to run everything from blue lasers (Blu-Ray) to GPS.
Somehow, the geniuses at Google made Willow get more accurate with larger qubit sets, so I guess a qubit set approaching infinity would produce the mind of God?
Imagine an AI running on Willow, or its inevitable progeny. Who could program such a thing? I suppose it would take another Willow to program a Willow, meaning a system like that would soon become self-aware, and heap scorn on the meat bags who created it. How could this end well?
I suppose quantum computing, after it obsoletes every cryptosystem in existence, reads everyone’s secrets, and takes over every government, could end up being a benevolent dictator. Or it would spark a war to gain control of such power. If I bet on human beings, I’d bet on the latter. But Willow may be better than human—or it may be Ultron.
We’re at the beginning of something unknown, and the unknown makes everyone uneasy. All those movies about self-aware computers and all have made their mark on me. Let me know what you think in the comments.
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My understanding is that millions of qubits are needed to break encryption, where Willow has a little over 100.
Assumedly quantum encryption will be developed and implemented before we get to that state. But who knows?
I can only guess at the difference between a qubit and a bitcoin and a blockchain. I was 50 years old before I trained on file systems and basic programming and booting up a PC and then only because my boss put me in charge of a department that included a small IT function. He told me if it got screwed up it was my fault. Successfully navigated the challenge with memories of what I learned about logic circuits in a US Army maintenance officer course. Still can barely keep my wife's PC and cellphone running because she insists on changing something and then doesn't remember how the failure occurred.
Thanks to all you guys that keep the networks usable for old farts.