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.

Book Review: Abundance (2025). Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson.

I have long been an admirer of Ezra Klein, his writing and his New York Times podcast The Ezra Klein Show. In my opinion, he is one of the most influential public intellectuals in American life today, because of his deep and wide knowledge of politics and public policy, his unflagging curiosity about life and the way the world works, and his excellence as an interviewer of other important thinkers, whether he agrees with their opinions or not.

What demonstrates to me his importance as a thought leader is the number of times his writings and podcasts have introduced important and original new ideas that have overcome initial pushback and skepticism to eventually be widely recognized as true and important insights, at least by the liberal-minded part of the population.

In Why We’re Polarized (2020), Klein did a deep dive into the data about social divisions in American society, finding both new and surprising explanations for our political and social polarization, and identifying forces and effects (particularly in our media environments) that are further destabilizing our democratic political systems.

Then in early 2024, he shocked the Democratic Party and many of its supporters with his column in the New York Times advocating that Joe Biden should not run for re-election, based on Biden’s age and age-related inability to run a dynamic, effective campaign despite a good record of success in office. This bold and perilous opinion on Klein’s part was met with intense hostility and opposition from within the party apparatus, only to be eventually accepted and embraced by the party and the electorate after Biden’s disastrous debate performance.

In his latest book, Abundance, a collaboration with co-author Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic and also a podcast host, Klein and Thompson build a conceptual framework for understanding why the Democratic Party and the left in general have lost the support of much of the population they have been trying so hard to help.

The principal problem they identify is the extent to which Democratic-led state and local governments have failed to provide the abundance they’ve promised, particularly in blue states like those on the West Coast. They provide a litany of examples of good promises unfulfilled, like the multi-decade high speed rail project in California, and the homelessness crisis and lack of affordable housing in major urban areas long governed by Democrats.

The primary reason they identify for this ongoing failure, despite the best of intentions, is the inability to build public infrastructure quickly and at a reasonable cost, such as  rapid mass transit, highways, more urban housing, clean energy projects and the like.

Klein and Thompson make the argument that Democrats and progressives should develop an exciting and positive vision of an abundant future, where our national wealth and high technology is used to build the kinds of cities, social amenities and clean environment people want to live in.

But the authors also suggest that Democratic leaders need to come to terms with the underlying reasons for their failures, such as NIMBYism, and the well-meaning over-regulation of public construction projects, which give the more affluent individuals and groups in communities the ability to endlessly delay and drive up the cost of projects they would rather not have in their own back yards.

In this argument, they are echoing an analysis I read recently in another new book, Why Nothing Works (2025) by Marc J. Dunkelman, which provides a longer-term historical account of how progressivism has always harbored two countervailing objectives that tend to create problems when out of balance. One of progressivism’s objectives has been to encourage strong government that can do good things for the people effectively, and prevent local obstructionism and corruption, but at the same time, it has also sought to protect the rights of individuals and communities against too-strong governments and corporations. These two objectives are in constant contention with each other within progressive thought.   

In Abundance, Klein and Thompson develop a similar argument, suggesting that Democrats over the past few decades have put in place so many administrative obstacles to getting things done, for the purpose of protecting the environment and the interests of their many minority and special interest constituencies, that the kind of grand achievements we used to be able to do as a society, like building the interstate highway system or sending men to the moon, can’t possibly be done rapidly or for an affordable price anymore.

The authors point out that the result is not only that fewer people vote for these Democratic governments and candidates, but in many places, people actually vote with their feet, moving to states where less liberal Republican administrations can provide cheaper housing, mass transit, highways and other desirable infrastructure and services because of the lesser constraints on governmental power and overreach.

If any of this (like the call for fewer regulations) sounds like an argument from the right, it isn’t. Klein and Thompson explicitly direct their arguments internally toward the left, in the hope of influencing liberals and progressives to see the value of diagnosing and fixing their own failures to build as a way of winning back votes and much of the popular support they have lost.

They also strongly contrast their abundance approach, the idea that creating social wealth and benefits creates a more just, fair and prosperous society, to the Trumpist “scarcity” style of politics, which constantly hammers away at the idea that there isn’t enough of anything, and whatever wealth there is, someone else is trying to take it away from you.

Abundance is not the last word on how Democrats and liberals need to reinvent the party, or fix all their problems. There is much here to debate, to consider and investigate further. But there is little doubt that Klein (with Thompson) has again written a groundbreaking, provocative book that is launching another movement or tendency on the left (“abundance” theory) that will become an important influence in liberal thought in the near future. Very highly recommended.

Book Review: The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel. Genius, Power and Deception on the Eve of World War I (2023). Douglas Brunt.

During the past year, I've read a number of excellent books that seemed to resonate as part of the backstory to some of the most urgent issues of our time. I will be reviewing several of them over the next few weeks, but this book seemed to be an intriguing place to start exploring some of these missing threads from which our contemporary world has been woven.

Everyone has heard of Diesel engines, the rugged machines that power much of our transportation across the globe, from ships, to trains, to trucks, cars and airplanes, as well as giant electrical generators and many other industrial and military applications. But far fewer of us know the story of the invention of the Diesel engine, or what was so significant about it as opposed to the other internal combustion engine designs of the modern era. 

 

Despite having reached a stage in life where I know quite a bit about history, this fascinating story about a crucial modern technology was almost a complete surprise to me. It begins with an account of the formative years of the inventor, Rudolph Diesel, starting with his impoverished childhood in France, Germany and England in the late nineteenth century, during which he managed to obtain an excellent engineering education despite his family’s poverty,  because of his prodigious and obvious mechanical genius. 

 

The author also introduces us along the way to John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil, and traces Rockefeller’s drive to create monopolistic control over the miraculous new energy source of the twentieth century: oil. This profile was also very enlightening, in showing us how Rockefeller sought to steer new industrial and popular energy technologies inexorably toward those that used his petroleum products as fuel, even as other possible sources of energy were being discovered and tried at the same time.

For example, Rockefeller first pushed to replace whale oil for city lighting with kerosene, a refined oil product, only to have kerosene’s future in the lighting market rapidly eclipsed by Edison’s electric light bulbs and the creation of early electrical power grids. With the market for kerosene lighting collapsing almost as quickly as it had opened, Rockefeller then became determined to see that all powered means of transportation should use the newly-invented internal combustion engine, which required highly refined petroleum products like kerosene and gasoline to function.   

Diesel’s remarkable engine design came into being at the exact same time the internal combustion engine was being invented. What was different about Diesel’s engine, though, was that rather than relying on the inherently combustible and explosive nature of gasoline, his engine used mechanical pressure on the fuel to create the heat needed to make the fuel combust. 

 

This meant that a diesel engine could run on many different types of inert, safer and more stable fuels, as it still can today, including fuels that could be created without needing to have oil wells or refineries. It could run on many types of vegetable oils, for example, like the bio-diesel fuels of our era made from corn or used cooking oil. And once Diesel had the engine fully designed, and the problems worked out, these engines proved to be simple and utterly reliable.

 

Rudolph Diesel apparently was driven from an early age to develop this engine for two reasons: first, to massively improve the efficiency of an engine’s use of fuel, compared to the pitiful 2% efficiency of the coal-burning steam engines of the nineteenth century. Second, Diesel wanted to provide endless and accessible “clean” power for the betterment of mankind, in contrast to the smoky miasma produced by coal engines. He appears to have been very much an idealist in that sense.

 

Nevertheless, when his engine invention took off on the world stage, he became a very wealthy man, one of the richest and most important men of the age. His story of brilliant invention, and then growing wealthy and famous on the basis of his world-changing new technology, is familiar. It's very much like the stories of the tech titans of our own era. But as with some of the more well-meaning tech entrepreneurs of our age, at a certain point Diesel could not avoid politics, nor business and engineering competition, at a time when the world’s major power technologies of the twentieth century were being invented. 

 

Brunt then explores a number of the important cross-currents Diesel had to navigate throughout his career. Diesel had to compete with the invention and rapid development of the internal combustion engine, and its backing by Rockefeller, who was determined to prevent any power plant type becoming dominant in the world market that did not require his oil. 

 

Diesel also had to keep innovating and improving his engines, managing his licenses and patents in many countries, and solving problems created by foreign engineers as they tried to implement his designs. And eventually, he had to come to terms with the fact that political leaders in numerous countries – especially Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany – were intent on using his marvelous engine design to power war machines, like submarines  and battleships, uses of which he morally disapproved. 

 

This is all fascinating history in its own right, but there is an added twist Brunt unveils toward the end of the story. It turns out that Rudolph Diesel disappeared, at the height of his fame and fortune, just before World War I began, apparently by falling or jumping overboard off a channel ferry on a night trip from France to Britain.

 

You can imagine the public fascination and uproar a mysterious and improbable disappearance like that would set off today if it happened to one of our major tech celebrities, particularly if the stories in the news kept changing and becoming less believable as the days went by. But the mystery was never solved. Brunt does a nice job laying out the threads of the mystery, reviewing the various theories that came and went, and then coming up with a startling but very plausible answer of his own as to what really happened to Rudolph Diesel.

 

This is an excellent piece of historical writing about an essential figure in the development of the modern world, whose remarkable story, and fame and fortune, somehow vanished from popular memory with the passing of time, and with his own mysterious disappearance. He may be gone, and mostly forgotten, but his remarkable invention still powers much of our world, even if in the end most diesel engines are powered by one of the oil-based fuel products Rockefeller and his heirs owned and controlled, and not one of the other non-petroleum fuels Diesel preferred.

 

Reading this book gave me new perspectives on the history of the engine technologies and fuels that power our world, and how those decisions were first made. It also reconfirmed the extent to which Big Oil, since its inception just as today, has been hyper-focused on pushing our society and its technology choices in ways that favor their profits and their political and economic control above all other factors. I didn’t know this particular part of that backstory, and I’m glad I do now. Highly recommended.

 

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. Erik Larson (2024).

In our fraught era of social and political polarization, we’ve become accustomed to hearing from pundits about how “there’s no precedent for this” and “we’re in uncharted territory” here. On a superficial level, of course that’s true. Our technology, our news media and modes of communication, our population demographics and so many other things that shape political behavior and life are very different now than they were earlier in American history.

On a deeper level, though, the history of the United States contains far more examples of similar events and tendencies to those in our modern era than we may remember. As the old saying goes, history never repeats itself, but it often rhymes. Fortunately, several excellent historians and social critics, most notably MSNBC’s popular anchor Rachel Maddow, have begun to turn their eyes and historical spotlights on earlier periods of conflict and strife in our nation’s history that resemble our own situation in important ways.

 

Erik Larson is one of the most popular and readable historians of recent years, and he has also provided us with a disturbing sense of historical parallel with his excellent new book, The Demon of Unrest. His usual storytelling approach is to revisit some event or period in history through the actions and memories of a small number of participants, to bring alive for the reader the lived experience of those who were there. He tries to recreate the look and feel of each era, and the period details and conditions that shaped it, through the lives and recollections of a small number of participants.

 

In Isaac’s Storm, he used this approach to revisit the calamity of the Galveston hurricane of 1900, and the birth of modern weather forecasting. In The Devil in the White City, Larson told the intriguing story of the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, and its architect and builder, along with the story of a notorious serial killer’s spree that happened nearby at the same time, and the dogged police investigation to apprehend him. Larson’s book In the Garden of Beasts captures the descent of German society in the 1930s into its Nazi nightmare, as experienced by an American diplomat and his family. Dead Wake portrays the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania during World War I, and the experience of those aboard. And in The Splendid and the Vile, Larson gave us an inside look at the Churchill family’s travails, relationships and exploits during the Blitz.

 

Now Larson has turned his adroit historical storytelling to the months leading up to the beginning of the Civil War. The scene is primarily set in Charleston, South Carolina, and begins with the election of Abraham Lincoln as the next president of the United States in late 1860.

 

Larson’s main characters include the U.S. Army commander of Fort Sumter and the other defensive forts in Charleston Harbor; a Southern radical bent on fomenting southern secession from the United States; and a Charleston society lady, who kept detailed diaries of the social life of the city’s notables as they went about preparing for separation from the north.

 

Of course, the human drama of all this is obvious to us now, knowing what lies immediately ahead for these hapless humans going about their ordinary lives in the midst of a developing political crisis. The dramatic tension builds steadily throughout the book, as wrong assumptions are made on both sides about the intentions and beliefs of the people on the other side of the growing divide between north and south.

 

One of the great strengths of this book is the manner in which Larson explores belief systems and social norms in the world of America in the early 1860s. I’ve noticed of late that more and more recent works of history, whether in books, film or television, seem to display a  heightened awareness of the centrality and importance of slavery to understanding our society, thanks no doubt in large part to works like The 1619 Project, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

 

This positive trend in giving appropriate significance to the social effects and role of slavery as an institution throughout American society is evident here too, as Larson delves into the extent to which the southern aristocracy perceived an existential threat to its way of life in the face of the growing northern abolitionist movement in the north, and in the western territories.

 

Larson details much about the southern aristocracy that embraced the idea of secession. He talks about their own name for themselves, “the Chivalry”, their sense of ancestral continuity and entitlement going back to old world pre-colonial Europe, and their view of themselves as the landed nobility of a near-feudal society. He describes the extent to which the ancient “Code Duello” was widely accepted in the south as the playbook for honorably resolving conflicts, through displays of manly bravery, chivalry and valor. We begin to understand the deep differences between how members of the political power structure of the south saw the world and its place in it, in contrast to the more modern industrial managers and urbanized elites of the north.                

 

What resulted was a tragic misunderstanding with catastrophic results. Although both sides made beginning steps toward bolstering their offensive and defensive military capabilities in the months before the cannons first fired at Fort Sumter, neither side seemed to believe that the other side would resort to arms to resolve the crisis over the issues of slavery and abolition.

 

The north didn’t believe the south would truly push for secession from the union. The southern states, believing they faced an existential threat to their way of life, didn’t believe the north had the determination or the bravery to resist their secessionist plans. Both sides believed things would ultimately be resolved in the normal course of peaceful negotiations. Unfortunately, neither side understood that its demands, and its view of the appropriate outcome, would never be acceptable to the other side.

 

The book ultimately manages to convey two important points about the months leading up to the Civil War, points which feel eerily relevant to our own tumultuous political era. One is the extent to which war arose because two halves of American society had little or no sense of what the other half was thinking, or what was most important to them, and weren't able or willing to communicate effectively with each other. Situations were misjudged, bad decisions were made, actions were taken or not taken, all based on a fundamental misreading of the mood and beliefs of the other half of the country.  

 

The other important insight is that we never really know what disaster awaits us just ahead, an idea as valuable to keep in mind now in our current situation as it was more than 150 years ago. We live our normal lives, and hope for the best. That’s what they did then, and it’s still what we have to do now. There are storm clouds all around us, but we don’t know if or when the storm will come. 

 

This is an excellent social and political history of American society and individuals on the brink of a devastating civil war. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI. Dr. Fei-Fei Li (2023).

This week, with all the sensational news of corporate upheaval and intrigue at OpenAI, the leading artificial intelligence (AI) company in the world, we’re all suddenly taking note of this strange new chapter in the history of human technological innovation. Indeed, ever since the release of ChatGPT last year, with its astounding capabilities to generate text and write software, it’s become an unavoidable new topic of conversation and thought, as we try to figure out what it portends for the future of work, society and even the human race itself.

 

It was in this context that I noticed and picked up a copy of The Worlds I See by Dr. Fei-Fei Li at my local library.  I’m so glad I did, because it’s a truly excellent book, combining a poignant personal account of the author’s life as a young Chinese immigrant girl, along with her parents, as they try to build a better life in America, with an insider’s look at how the quest for AI has developed over the past two decades inside our major universities and corporations.

 

If you dive into the details of AI and its history in the various news stories now appearing almost daily in the media, you will quickly find not only Dr. Li’s name and story, but also those of many of the other influential players with whom she has worked and who she names and describes in her book, who are now leading the industry and its ongoing research and development. 

 

Li’s most notable contribution to the field flowed from her decision as a young professor to try to build a huge database (called Image Net) holding digitized, labelled images of all the physical objects in our world. She succeeded, despite the seemingly overwhelming size of the project, and the discouragement of some older eminent scientists in the field, who saw it as both a hopeless and pointless undertaking. Her account of the process by which she led a small group of young scientists to overcome every obstacle in their way is a fascinating and inspiring story of scientists and engineers at work in our own era.

 

But her success in creating Image Net had unexpected consequences that accelerated the larger AI project. After sponsoring a contest to have other researchers use her database to train algorithms for computerized visual recognition of objects over several years, it suddenly turned out that neural networks – an AI architecture that had been tried in the past but had been in academic disfavor for several decades – proved to be massively more effective than more recent techniques, once it had been trained with a sufficiently large database.

 

From this major achievement, Dr. Li became one of the top experts in computer vision in the world. She was sought after as a scientist, researcher and teacher, and ended up moving from Princeton to Stanford, and then ultimately to a top position in AI at Google, where she found a very different culture than that of academia, with different priorities, and a far larger budget for her fast-growing research department.

    

At the same time she was leading this world-changing AI research, though, she was also living a human life we would all recognize. For example, her mother has suffered for many years with a chronic, life-threatening health condition, which led Dr. Li to think about new uses to which AI could and should be put in serving the needs of humanity.

 

As a result of her mother’s challenge to use her research to help others, she became involved in an effort to apply computer vision to problems of patient care in hospitals. But when she encountered unexpected resistance from those she thought she was helping (the nurses and medical staff), she was forced to begin considering more closely the negative side of the AI equation, and to think more deeply about the ethical and moral implications of her life’s work.

 

In the course of this life she recounts, she has also been a wife, a mother, a friend and mentor to many colleagues, and a loving daughter to both her parents, and she nicely weaves many of those important personal relationships and how they influenced her work into the larger story of her brilliant career.

 

So much of how we reached this technological moment, and what it portends for our futures, has taken place behind the closed doors of university laboratories and in corporate board rooms.  This outstanding and compassionate personal account by a leading scientist in AI explains how we got here, what it felt like to be one of the key contributors in such a dramatic process of human discovery and innovation, and also how both the perils and potential rewards of this technology have come into sharper focus at each step forward. Very highly recommended.