One of the more positive headlines to come out of the tech industry news cycle includes proclamations that the current chip shortage is both a temporary problem and not repeatable. Vendors like Intel, AMD, STMicro, Acer, Dell, and TSMC have all targeted 2023 as the year we return to normalcy.
That would be nice if it were true. It’s not that anyone is lying about the market’s recovery, but they are at best inaccurate about the actual date or year. The more they zone in on it, the further it seems to stretch out.
Consider the problems currently facing most suppliers with their own factories in China. They are all running at 100% capacity (or are trying to). They are all trying to keep staff working and productive. They are all trying to get people to put in overtime to keep up with demand. They have been doing this since harsh COVID-19 lockdowns lifted in affected provinces, running ragged since March 2020 because the rest of the world suddenly needed to work from home.
This potent combination of overwork and oversupply due to extreme levels of demand has created a problem for China’s power grid. The over-use of resources in the past year has started to affect the price of coal and gas that feed local power plants, and they’re building new coal plants as fast as they’re legally allowed to. They must construct additional pylons at all costs to avoid brownouts, load shedding, and grid failures, because expansion is the only way China’s economy keeps on functioning.
However, China recognises the need to reduce carbon emissions, which makes coal power unsuitable for long-term planning. So whatever they come up with now is only temporary.
Beijing moved to put a lid on the power shortages by decreeing that power utilities that rely on coal plants must increase their output, and factories must reduce their power consumption. They cannot operate on weekends. They cannot operate for an entire week, in some locations. This is in addition to other limits that are imposed on residential areas, in shopping centres, and in cities with high pollution levels. Pundits who have been watching the situation closely argue that it has been coming for a long time, but perhaps no-one could have seen it coming so quickly.
Especially not the aluminium smelters that have had to shut down operations.
Everything that could go wrong, and is currently going wrong, seems to be doing so all at the same time. China’s energy crisis is taking place at the same time as a debt bubble from housing investments looks set to burst, and international pressure mounts in response to the genocide of the Uyghurs.
The chip shortage is a small taste of the future that we’ll have to be comfortable with. Climate change, power consumption, resource availability, and the lack of truly recyclable plastics and materials is catching up with us faster than we predicted. The increasing pressure put on economies as large as China’s inevitably will affect the entire world, and they’re not the only one dealing with these issues.
Everywhere you look, these problems are becoming increasingly nuanced.
We can’t just solve one aspect of China’s power woes, there’s an entire chain of things that need to be fixed to support their switch to using renewables and nuclear energy to maintain growth. That chain has multiple points of failure, including the lack of political will to fix these issues. And then once that’s done there’s a water crisis to address, and a wage gap crisis, and an aging population, and a distinct inability to order computers and servers at short notice. The list just grows with each passing second.
Robin Hanson wrote in 1996 that interpretations of the Fermi Paradox lend themselves to suggesting that there is a “Great Filter” on a universal scale that dictates how and when intelligent life may eventually give rise to advanced colonisation of space. Becoming spacefaring is a future goal of humanity, we’re so close to achieving Type-1 status on the Kardashev Scale. We’re beginning to see where that threshold could be.
The Great Filter could be one or any number of things together that we need to avoid or overcome:
- We achieve dominance across our own solar system, but nuclear war amongst ourselves is what kills us.
- We run into multiple brick walls that prevent our advancement because our technology isn’t advanced enough, and we die through the collapse of ecosystems here on Earth.
- We create the conditions to reach a technological singularity in general artificial intelligence, and our creation turns on us because it predicts our doom at our own hand (that’s a popular one).
- Unkillable bacteria spreads throughout our population like wildfire (a personal favourite).
Perhaps it is the case, universally, that an intelligent, warring, and highly exploitative species being unable to responsibly consume resources – and build an efficient and effective supply chain to match – is where the filter itself lies. Having a growth mindset only works if you can grow at all.
The chip shortage and China’s power woes are going to extend things beyond 2023, but what we’re running head-first into is probably, maybe, quite likely the Great Filter. For the first time since 1983 we have several global superpowers at loggerheads with each other, each armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles equipped with nuclear warheads and armies of drone swarms.
We all agree that climate change is inevitable and a major problem. We all agree that putting all our manufacturing capabilities into one country just so that we can get cheap labour out of it is unsustainable. We all agree that not being able to buy a graphics card or a PlayStation 5 from local stores is a major problem for the computer industry. We all know how dangerously close we are to ecosystem collapse. We’re still not doing anything about it.
But anyway, that’s why you can’t get a graphics card this week. And next week. And next month. And next year.
Yikes.