Scott Aaronson is the David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and director of its Quantum Information Center. Previously, he taught for nine years in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. His research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory more generally.
1. The US stopped TSMC from fabbing leading edge Kirin CPUs for Huawei (designed by Huawei's chip design subsidiary HiSilicon). These were used in their smartphones. For a year or two Huawei was arguably the leading smartphone maker in the world and looked entirely capable of competing against Samsung and Apple. US Nat Sec concerns had more to do with Huawei's 5G business. But 5G infrastructure doesn't use leading edge chips (the base stations are big and don't rely on battery power the way phones do). The connection between Huawei's smartphone business and its 5G infrastructure business is very indirect -- they are entirely different businesses.
2. No sanctions were applied to ZTE which, unlike Huawei, is an actual state-owned entity and had previously been on the US entity list. ZTE also sells 5G infrastructure equipment. It is flourishing while Huawei is starting to run low on the non-leading edge chips (e.g., >20nm process) it buys for its base stations.
It's hard to explain what the US was up to with Huawei -- I would say it's a good example of the kind of incoherent "emergent" policy that Hanania writes about in his new book.
If you believe all the Western propaganda about Huawei and Xinjiang produced over the last few years you might be an NPC or at least someone who doesn't properly calibrate their Bayesian updates. As such it isn't really worth my effort to engage with you.
Regarding PRC invasion of Taiwan, missile technology, etc. see
The Simulation Hypothesis is the idea that our universe might be part of a simulation: we are not living in base reality. (See, e.g., earlier discussion here.)
There are many versions of the argument supporting this hypothesis, which has become more plausible (or at least more popular) over time as computational power, and our familiarity with computers and virtual worlds within them, has increased.
Modern cosmology suggests that our universe, our galaxy, and our solar system, have billions of years ahead of them, during which our civilization (currently only ~10ky old!), and others, will continue to evolve. It seems reasonable that technology and science will continue to advance, delivering ever more advanced computational platforms. Within these platforms it is likely that quasi-realistic simulations, of our world, or of imagined worlds (e.g., games), will be created, many populated by AI agents or avatars. The number of simulated beings could eventually be much larger than the number of biologically evolved sentient beings. Under these assumptions, it is not implausible that we ourselves are actually simulated beings, and that our world is not base reality.
One could object to using knowledge about our (hypothetically) simulated world to reason about base reality. However, the one universe that we have direct observational contact with seems to permit the construction of virtual worlds with large populations of sentient beings. While our simulation may not be entirely representative of base reality, it nevertheless may offer some clues as to what is going on "outside"!
The simulation idea is very old. It is almost as old as computers themselves. However, general awareness of the argument has increased significantly, particularly in the last decade. It has entered the popular consciousness, transcending its origins in the esoteric musings of a few scientists and science fiction authors.
The concept of a quantum computer is relatively recent -- one can trace the idea back to Richard Feynman's early-1980s Caltech course: Physical Limits to Computation. Although quantum computing has become a buzzy part of the current hype cycle, very few people have any deep understanding of what a quantum computer actually is, and why it is different from a classical computer. A prerequisite for this understanding is a grasp of both the physical and mathematical aspects of quantum mechanics, which very few possess. Individuals who really understand quantum computing tend to have backgrounds in theoretical physics, physics, or perhaps computer science or mathematics.
The possibility of quantum computers requires that we reformulate the Simulation Hypothesis in an important way. If one is willing to posit future computers of gigantic power and complexity, why not quantum computers of arbitrary power? And why not simulations which run on these quantum computers, making use of quantum algorithms? After all, it was Feynman's pioneering observation that certain aspects of the quantum world (our world!) are more efficiently simulated using a quantum computer than a classical (e.g., Turing) machine. (See quantum extension of the Church-Turing thesis.) Hence the original Simulation Hypothesis should be modified to the Quantum Simulation Hypothesis: Do we live in a quantum simulation?
There is an important consequence for those living in a quantum simulation: they exist in a quantum multiverse. That is, in the (simulated) universe, the Many Worlds description of quantum mechanics is realized. (It may also be realized in base reality, but that is another issue...) Within the simulation, macroscopic, semiclassical brains perceive only one branch of the almost infinite number of decoherent branches of the multiverse. But all branches are realized in the execution of the unitary algorithm running on qubits. The power of quantum computing, and the difficulty of its realization, both derive from the requirement that entanglement and superposition be maintained in execution.
Given sufficiently powerful tools, the beings in the simulation could test whether quantum evolution of qubits under their control is unitary, thereby verifying the absence of non-unitary wavefunction collapse, and the existence of other branches (see, e.g., Deutsch 1986).
We can give an anthropic version of the argument as follows.
1. The physical laws and cosmological conditions of our universe seem to permit the construction of large numbers of virtual worlds containing sentient beings.
2. These simulations could run on quantum computers, and in fact if the universe being simulated obeys the laws of quantum physics, the hardware of choice is a quantum computer. (Perhaps the simulation must be run on a quantum computer!)
If one accepts points 1 and 2 as plausible, then: Conditional on the existence of sentient beings who have discovered quantum physics (i.e., us), the world around them is likely to be a simulation running on a quantum computer. Furthermore, these beings exist on a branch of the quantum multiverse realized in the quantum computer, obeying the rules of Many Worlds quantum mechanics. The other branches must be there, realized in the unitary algorithm running on (e.g., base reality) qubits.
The US needs a national AI strategy. Many academic researchers that could contribute to AI research -- including to fundamental new ideas and algorithms, mathematical frameworks for better understanding why some algorithms and architectures work better than others, etc. -- are not able to get involved at the real frontier because they lack the kind of curated data sets and large compute platforms that researchers at Google Brain or DeepMind have access to. Those resources are expensive, but necessary for rapid progress. We need national infrastructure platforms -- similar to physics user facilities like an accelerator or light source or telescope -- in order to support researchers at our universities and national labs doing work in machine learning, AI, and data science.
In contrast, China has articulated a very ambitious national AI plan which has them taking the lead sometime in the 2020s.
Eric Schmidt discusses these points in the video, declaring this a Sputnik moment:
