A hobbyist with a few thousands of dollars to throw around can make chips from the 70s or 80s in their garage. If some catastrophe wiped out all the best fabs, the machines that made them, and the people who knew how to put them together, as long as that didn't go along with a complete loss of all existing computing hardware and industrial capital you'd probably see production of chips from the 90s or early 2000s be up and running at scale within a year and as long as all the documentation of the actual tech behind modern chips wasn't lost people could relearn it and the machines required could be recreated and things would probably be back to where they are now within the decade.
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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I think it's crazy to not open source everything, which is would happen in communism. Not just because of bus factor, but also for collaboration. Companies put random trace metals in their experimental chips, so you can't reverse engineer them from mass spectroscopy.
On the other hand, a lot of the knowledge isn't really secret, just patented and documented in papers. And many, many research institutes and companies who don't even make semiconductors, just parts for machines who do, share in the knowledge. After a catastrophe, we wouldn't have the newest generation chips anymore and it would take a lot of resources and effort to rebuild fabs, but we wouldn't start from zero.
What happens when their institutional knowledge decays? We just can’t make the computers that run MRI machines anymore?
bronze age collapse
What happens when their institutional knowledge decays?
How would this happen when it's being actively used? It would be one thing if there was a Butlerian jihad that lasted 5 years or something but I find that doubtful. I suppose one could question what happens if there's a nuclear war or some other similar level cataclysm and how able would humans in the ashes be to restart high tech manufacturing and society and there is a bit of a question mark on that with estimates saying 30 years or 100 years or 150 years to get back on top again.
I've heard some very dire things about if we're set back too far because all the easy to access hydrocarbons and metals have been mined so rebuilding society from say the start of the industrial age level tech may not be easily possible for some speculative set of re-primitive-ized humans who lack access to any parts of the modern supply chain, industrialization etc in any working order and such a surviving group of primitive humans might end up stuck for 500 or a thousand years in a pre-industrial society trying but failing to break out of it. That seems a more realistic and dire problem than a bunch of humans with modern knowledge and tools still having to re-do some a bit of specific knowledge.
I'd say that this stuff in particular was built off other sciences and human knowledge and we could start again off whatever basis they began working off but with the advantage of having samples of the work and at least vague ideas of working principles which is more than can be said for the people who originally built this stuff in the last 80 years of human society from what came before them with a lot of trial, error and experimentation. It would probably fuck up capitalist societies more than China who could just direct state research at it while western capitalists squabble and embezzle government grants before resolving to buy or steal China's knowledge.
I read a fascinating article once about a factory that turned a petroleum byproduct into some kind of rare and useful chemical.
The company gets sold after chugging along for decades. The new owner wants to double the capacity, but there's nobody alive who can remember how it works. There are people who know how to fix the various parts of it when it breaks down, but nobody who knows how the whole thing works. The relevant documents got lost at some point. They ended up having to hire a bunch of people to reverse engineer it.
It's probably not analogous to semiconductors, though. One of the biggest reasons the institutional knowledge was lost at the chemical plant was because they never needed to change anything. They didn't need to access the institutional knowledge and it eventually died off.
China is making great strides in this area and will break through. The US can be as dumb as it wants but it can't control knowledge for everyone else.