More specialized, highly-trained professionals, stronger formal oversight and central planning, easier choice of neighbors, and no economic room for amateurs to compete, all of which means less informal interdisciplinary coordination.
If John Smith in dath ilan invents a new, faster CPU and tries to make money with it, he does so by checking around for existing prizes, not by doing the marketing himself. Whoever’s offering the prize is, presumably, in on the conspiracy, and sets up conditions for collecting the money which bring John in on it too. If he doesn’t try to make money? Nobody cares, outside maybe his immediate circle of friends.
Professional chip designers, as individuals who share a common interest, would all live together and know each other. If some conspiracy can be made to appeal to most of them, dissenters face ostracism and loss of formal qualifications, possibly starting over in a completely new career which decades of ultraspecialized training would not have adequately prepared them for. Adapting to those circumstances would be virtuous, of course, but that doesn’t make it easy, and obsessively rapid iteration means low tolerance for stubborn people in general.
If John Smith in dath ilan invents a new, faster CPU and tries to make money with it, he does so by checking around for existing prizes, not by doing the marketing himself.
Why not create his new CPU, and then offer his own prize for someone to market it, instead?
If he doesn’t try to make money?
Arguably, that could be worse. What if he makes the designs widely available at no cost? You could have a dozen unrelated small groups around the world start manufacturing the new chips within a week.
Professional chip designers, as individuals who share a common interest, would all live together and know each other.
That is true. It is quite possible that the CPU throttling is a conspiracy among professionals. However, the fact that the CPUs are being throttled leaves a clear opening for a gifted amateur—one not (yet?) inducted in the conspiracy—to create a design that grabs the low-hanging fruit left purposely untouched by the professionals.
It also leaves an opening for one of the professionals to defect, and try to gain income and fame by creating a faster CPU despite being a member of the conspiracy.
Why would there be a dozen unrelated chip-fabricating facilities sitting idle in different corners of the world, when everyone lives in the same city, every group with shared interests carves out their own neighborhood, and there’s an overwhelming social norm to coordinate and standardize for increased efficiency? If there aren’t such factories, whoever tries to build one will attract the conspiracy’s attention during the permit-application process. If the factories exist but aren’t idle, newcomers will be competing with better-coordinated conspiracy members for production time before they can even test prototypes.
If an actual shutout fails, microtech in production seems like it would be absurdly easy to sabotage. Contaminate the raw materials, introduce a single-bit error into quality control so it rejects flawless chips and passes garbage, tweak the blueprints and/or assembly mechanisms so layers are misaligned, overheat it to denature the semiconductors. Overseer assesses the probability that a whole sequence of factory techs each made some grossly negligent or malicious mistake with this one model of chip, but no others before or since, concludes that the design itself is flawed.
Rapid iteration means the design is then thrown out, and the designers bluntly exhorted to either learn from those with a proven record (conspirators, all) or move on to some line of work that better suits their talents.
More specialized, highly-trained professionals, stronger formal oversight and central planning, easier choice of neighbors, and no economic room for amateurs to compete, all of which means less informal interdisciplinary coordination.
If John Smith in dath ilan invents a new, faster CPU and tries to make money with it, he does so by checking around for existing prizes, not by doing the marketing himself. Whoever’s offering the prize is, presumably, in on the conspiracy, and sets up conditions for collecting the money which bring John in on it too. If he doesn’t try to make money? Nobody cares, outside maybe his immediate circle of friends.
Professional chip designers, as individuals who share a common interest, would all live together and know each other. If some conspiracy can be made to appeal to most of them, dissenters face ostracism and loss of formal qualifications, possibly starting over in a completely new career which decades of ultraspecialized training would not have adequately prepared them for. Adapting to those circumstances would be virtuous, of course, but that doesn’t make it easy, and obsessively rapid iteration means low tolerance for stubborn people in general.
Why not create his new CPU, and then offer his own prize for someone to market it, instead?
Arguably, that could be worse. What if he makes the designs widely available at no cost? You could have a dozen unrelated small groups around the world start manufacturing the new chips within a week.
That is true. It is quite possible that the CPU throttling is a conspiracy among professionals. However, the fact that the CPUs are being throttled leaves a clear opening for a gifted amateur—one not (yet?) inducted in the conspiracy—to create a design that grabs the low-hanging fruit left purposely untouched by the professionals.
It also leaves an opening for one of the professionals to defect, and try to gain income and fame by creating a faster CPU despite being a member of the conspiracy.
Why would there be a dozen unrelated chip-fabricating facilities sitting idle in different corners of the world, when everyone lives in the same city, every group with shared interests carves out their own neighborhood, and there’s an overwhelming social norm to coordinate and standardize for increased efficiency? If there aren’t such factories, whoever tries to build one will attract the conspiracy’s attention during the permit-application process. If the factories exist but aren’t idle, newcomers will be competing with better-coordinated conspiracy members for production time before they can even test prototypes.
If an actual shutout fails, microtech in production seems like it would be absurdly easy to sabotage. Contaminate the raw materials, introduce a single-bit error into quality control so it rejects flawless chips and passes garbage, tweak the blueprints and/or assembly mechanisms so layers are misaligned, overheat it to denature the semiconductors. Overseer assesses the probability that a whole sequence of factory techs each made some grossly negligent or malicious mistake with this one model of chip, but no others before or since, concludes that the design itself is flawed.
Rapid iteration means the design is then thrown out, and the designers bluntly exhorted to either learn from those with a proven record (conspirators, all) or move on to some line of work that better suits their talents.