US military has been using AI for quite some time for ISR - scanning satellite data and detecting targets of interest, especially Navy.
What will be new AI development - is "self-driving" anti-personnel/anti-materiel drones.
Current capabilities are already pretty close to "self-driving" - for example HARM missiles that home in on AA radar.
and the next frontier will be autonomous robots conducting combat missions automatically
the sole reason why US protects Taiwan for its microchips is because they can be used in military AI. Not because iPhones or smart fridges will lose microchip supplier.
At scale these chips will pave the way for autonomous smart combat platforms in any domain.
1. The USA's current stance toward Taiwan is largely a continuation of its historic stance, which had absolutely nothing to do with semiconductors.
The USA currently maintains a strategic ambiguity wherein the USA sell arms and also remains capable of providing for Taiwan's defense, but provides no specific defense guarantee. That basic stance has been US policy since the 1970s, long before Taiwan became a semiconductor powerhouse. The Six Assurances were communicated to Taiwan about half a decade before the founding of TSMC.
2. TSMC and Taiwan are enormously important to the economy of the United States. The economic damage caused by loss of chip supply would be a major economic event, leading to simultaneous rapid goods inflation, massive equity draw-down, contraction in the real economy, etc.
At least in the short term -- 1-2 years after invasion -- domestic unrest due to the economic damage would be far more disruptive to the USA's capability and willingness to go to war than chip supply in the defense industry (the DoD, through a combination of reserve supply and substitution, would be able to operate effectively for many years without new chip supplies).
The military's need for TSMC-manufactured chips certainly provides a more hawkish hue to the USA's ambiguity, but it's far from the primary reason for USA's backing of Taiwan.
That is a different conclusion to what you stated in your first comment. You've retreated to a motte ('The US is restricting transfer of chip technology to China for strategic purposes, a large part of which is due to AI and military applications of fast compute'), from your bailey ("The only reason the US wishes to defend Taiwan is because of the military use of the chips produced there"). The comment disagreeing was only disagreeing with the latter statement and contains nothing contradicting the first.
"All" US citizens, no. Naturalized citizens, most of whom were born in China and naturalized on the basis that it would be good for America; so, if you're working on things that are contrary to American interests, you risk losing your recently-gained citizenship.
The US couldn't revoke citizenship from someone who was born a citizen, for example.
That means there are two classes of citizens and the law doesn’t really like to make that explicit and is horrible
I think there is a western country that has a law effectively saying if a person has dual nationality and they commit a horrible crime, that person can be stripped of their citizenship which makes citizens equal
> This is about maintaining long-term leader position in military technology of which AI is a big part.
Yes, but this is part of the strategy to contain CCP while competing with it, deterring it from trying to take over Taiwan, preventing another Ukraine, which could be costly even if the war is won.
The strategy to compete with CCP, instead of co-operating (as a factory of the World and a reliable trade partner), became mainstream since 2018 or so, when CCP show that it wanted to challenge the current world order (see the China 2049 Initiative by Xi).
> 1. The USA's current stance toward Taiwan is largely a continuation of its historic stance, which had absolutely nothing to do with semiconductors.
> The USA currently maintains a strategic ambiguity...The Six Assurances were communicated to Taiwan about half a decade before the founding of TSMC.
This.
The strategic ambiguity is a message from the US to both sides of the Taiwan strait:
1. It deters CCP from taking over Taiwan,
2. It also deters Taiwan from changing the status quo.
But given the recent trajectory of CCP under Xi's dictatorship to be more aggressive, US has been more assertive of the defense of Taiwan [1] (though it is still technically a strategic ambiguity, unlike its Security Treaty with Japan).
Was with you until you said sole reason. The dod sources chips from GloFo (nee ibm) and smaller players. Because GloFo is such a laggard Intel was onboarded/recruited/shanghai'd to provide cutting edge nodes. This was some years ago.
What will be new AI development - is "self-driving" anti-personnel/anti-materiel drones.
Current capabilities are already pretty close to "self-driving" - for example HARM missiles that home in on AA radar.
and the next frontier will be autonomous robots conducting combat missions automatically
the sole reason why US protects Taiwan for its microchips is because they can be used in military AI. Not because iPhones or smart fridges will lose microchip supplier.
At scale these chips will pave the way for autonomous smart combat platforms in any domain.