Albert Einstein famously speculated, “I don’t know with which weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
His premise was ominous, his conclusion logical. Just the thought of nuclear holocaust wiping out three million years of progress and sending us back into our caves, was enough to send shivers up one’s spine, not to mention thoughts of extinction through one’s mind. But in today’s world, Einstein would most likely find himself making a big adjustment. That’s because Albert Einstein lived in a world that was not dominated by or dependent on microprocessors. Today’s world is, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that wars will be fought over chips – and certainly with them.
Long before the US brought World War II to a close with two nuclear weapons, Einstein declined to participate in the Manhattan Project, which developed them, and wrote a series of four letters to President Roosevelt with his thoughts on the atomic age, which was then already upon them.
That was then, when the most potent force was nuclear power. But this is now, when the most potent force – and valuable commodity – is chips.
The most important company in the world
That would make Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, in the opinion of Nicholas Kristof, “the most important company in the world”. Not a bad point – and easily defensible – as TSMC is, in Kristof’s words, “the only company I can think of in history that could cause a global depression if it were forced to halt production.” Global depression is not hyperbolic at this point, as TSMC makes roughly 90% of the advanced chips in the world. Now does “global depression” sound hyperbolic?
Here’s where leadership really matters
Halt production? Wait. What? Well, that could happen in one of two ways: natural disaster (Taiwan lies on a fault line) or geopolitical and/or military conflict (China wants Taiwan). In case of the former, let us trust that TSMC has a rock-solid Plan B…and C…and so on. But in case of the latter, that’s where leadership comes in. Not your ordinary day-to-day management posing as leadership. Not ulterior motive “leadership” that we’ll see plenty of this election year (and not just in the US, either). But real visionary leadership. Rooseveltian leadership. Churchillian leadership. Lincolnesque and Washingtonian leadership. Why? Because only leaders like that could grasp the concept that the cause for which they’re fighting is greater than the gain anyone would realize through one-sided “victory.”
In this case, no one leader would realize a partisan win; every leader – every true leader – would simply contribute to the cause. Period.
Given that we have more computing power in our cars than the Apollo crew had when landing on the moon – and what’s in your car is technically advanced chips but only the bottom rung of that ladder – and what’s coming sooner than you think is more and more AI and quantum computing – it becomes an existential matter to ensure an unclouded vision that mutuality must, at all costs, supercede individuality.
As Benjamin Franklin said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when John Hancock averred that we must all hang together, “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
A leadership moment
We are indeed at a leadership moment, the true test of which will be when everyone gains and no one wins.