The Memory Cache -- Now on Substack!

Hello, and greetings to all my friends, family and interested readers!

As you may know, since early 2022 I’ve been posting to this personal blog site, The Memory Cache. The blog contains reviews of books, movies and television I’ve consumed and enjoyed, information and opinion that I wanted to share with all of you and the world. My site recently passed 29,000 views since it began, and continues to draw new readers.

During 2024 and early this year, I spent most of my creative energies on writing Dawn to Dusk, a Storyworth memoir for my close family and friends. I have no plans to share it with a wider audience, but I wanted to let you know that this writing project and its time demands were the principal reasons I didn’t post much on The Memory Cache last year, and also have written and recorded no new music during that time.

Fortunately, that book writing project is finally completed. It’s in print now, and is being shared with those for whom it was written. Now I’m clearing the decks to resume writing more often for The Memory Cache, and also heading back into my studio to make new music. 

In conjunction with my return to more active posting on The Memory Cache, I am also now on Substack. Starting in the next few days, I will be posting all my new articles and posts (including this one) for the blog web site on my Substack account as well.

If you previously signed up to my mailing list via my music web site at Wayne Parker Music, you have been added to my Substack mailing list. Of course, if you don’t wish to receive these emails with my new articles and posts, please do avail yourself of the “Unsubscribe” button. But you’re on the list initially because you had previously indicated an interest in my creative activities.

If you think you are a subscriber, you should have received my first post (this message) as an email yesterday. If you didn't, please check your spam folder for an email from The Memory Cache at Substack, and if you find the email there, put my email address on your "safe senders" list so they won't be blocked in the future. 

If you’re not on my Substack mailing list, but would like to be, there’s now a link on this site that will take you to Substack to sign up. There’s no paywall on my posts. It’s all free, at least for now.

And now, a word about our current circumstances. When I began The Memory Cache, I didn’t plan for it to have an overtly political purpose, but of course, my reviews and the content I have chosen to write about have undoubtedly reflected my general political and emotional biases, and my reactions to the world around me.

I don’t expect that to change. Probably like most of you, I am hyper-focused on and aware of the daily onslaught of bad news for our democracy, our country’s reputation in the world, our economy, science and education, our environment and our health. Fortunately, there are many other voices, sources of valuable news and smart opinion on all this elsewhere, especially on Substack, as well as at major news outlets and advocacy organizations.

My intention is not to add directly to that coverage, but rather to continue to publicize and comment occasionally on notable intellectual and artistic content around us that can help us understand the complex and difficult problems we face, and sometimes also enjoy moments of reprieve from it all in the form of leisure and entertainment.

If you enjoy and value what I have to say on the blog and on Substack, please tell your friends, and help me build my audience.  My user/writer handle on Substack is @thememorycache. You can follow all my creative activities on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube at @wayneparkernotes.  And thanks for your interest!

Book Review: Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022). Chris Miller.

I was intrigued this morning to read an article about a growing problem in the latest iterations of new generative AI products. This problem has been recognized and widely discussed for the last several years, but apparently in many cases, it’s not being solved as the AI software and systems become more sophisticated and complex. Apparently it’s getting worse, much worse. That problem is “hallucination”, the tendency of AI systems to make up “facts” in response to queries. 

 

When I read news like that, it tends to support a gut feeling of mine that the current hype about AI and how it’s going to change everything for the better is at the very least overblown, and perhaps completely wrong, a sci-fi fantasy from our tech leaders’ childhoods that in reality could become a dystopian, dangerous nightmare, rather than a wondrous achievement for humanity. But that’s a larger topic for another time.

 

In the meantime, our current computer systems, our phones, the internet and all the electronic information technologies of our era have become indispensable resources for every aspect of our lives, at work and at play. Through the accumulated scientific knowledge and engineering of the recent past, these things all exist, and most of us take them for granted. We don’t tend to think about them that much, but perhaps we should.

 

Most of us probably don’t think about how critical computer automation has become to our survival, as more and more of our societal life support systems, our roads, our airspace, our banking system, our hospitals, our communications and so many other parts of modern society are put under computer control. Very few of us actually know much about how these things came to be, how they work, or what it takes to keep turning out the steadily more powerful automation products we all use and rely upon.

 

This is why Chris Miller’s book Chip War is the essential book for understanding many aspects of our current situation. It starts at the beginning, telling the history of the invention of the transistor, soon followed by the development of the integrated circuit (known as a “chip”), a small electronic component onto which many transistors can be printed using a highly refined photo imaging process. He also provides a clear description for the lay reader on how these inventions function, and why they are essential to the creation of computers and the internet.

 

From that necessary introduction, he then tells a much longer and more complicated story about how the initial inventions were steadily improved and disseminated around the world over the past half-century. He focuses on important individuals at each stage of development, and how certain companies and countries competed to dominate different aspects of both ongoing creation of better chip designs, and the actual production of the chips based on the designs.

 

As someone with a long history in IT and computers myself, I knew some of what was in this riveting and important book, but I learned so much more, and it was fascinating.

 

Miller talks about the different approaches taken by important countries over the decades to try to gain access to the newest and best designs and products coming out of the U.S.A. For example, he traces how the Soviet Union and then Russia after the Soviet Union’s collapse tried to simply steal the latest technology from the West, both the designs and often the chips themselves. As he explains, this has kept Russia consistently a decade behind the United States and Europe in the types and quality of chips it could produce or consume in mass.

 

In China, however, they took a different route. While trying to build up their own research and development capabilities, the Chinese focused on creating advanced manufacturing for some types of chips, especially memory chips, as well as building factories to create integrated products like circuit boards, and consumer products like PCs, laptops, and smartphones. It wasn’t that they didn’t also steal the latest Western technology whenever they could, but they did vastly more than Russia to also develop their own advanced research and manufacturing capabilities. As a result, they own or dominate some important segments of the global chip manufacturing and high-tech product market.

 

In the United States, where the technology was invented, the top companies dominated most or all aspects of creating the latest, most advanced chips for several decades. But over time, some of the premier companies were out-competed by a few companies in other countries, and merged or went out of business.

 

The United States, particularly with companies like Intel and AMD,  still retains dominance in the development of the new designs for the latest generations of chips, but several other countries now have companies in that race. In the meantime, the United States, and almost all other countries, have ceded control over the production of the most vital chips – the CPUs, or Central Processing Units that control the operations of all computers – to a single country, Taiwan, and to a single company there that has been willing to make the huge investments in equipment and facilities required to be able to produce the current and near-future generations of processor chips.

 

The story of how that happened, how the United States and its premier chip companies lost the ability to manufacture its most vital computing components after designing them is just one fascinating tale from this exhaustive history of the chip industry. And it is an absolutely vital story to know and understand, in order to better comprehend some major political issues we now face.

 

For example, knowing that Taiwan is the world’s sole source for producing the latest and best CPU chips explains why the question of China’s desire to take back control of Taiwan, and the West’s need to prevent that has become such a perennially vital national security issue for the United States. Being aware of this situation also explains why all recent American administrations have wanted to bring chip manufacturing back to the U.S.A., with only limited success.

 

Chip War is filled with these sorts of “how did we not know this?” stories and background. It also drives home as few other things I’ve read, how absolutely dependent we have become on computer chips, on the same level of importance as the oil and energy resources that drive our economy. It’s also a very enlightening history of the brilliant people, the companies and countries that have created and improved these magical little devices that are now embedded in so much of the smart environment in which we now live. Highly recommended.