> And new competitors have such an uphill battle it will be almost impossible to catch up. That's almost all of the science, engineering, industry and bureaucr

> And new competitors have such an uphill battle it will be almost impossible to catch up. That's almost all of the science, engineering, industry and bureaucracy of modern civilization in general, not just the chip industry. Experts and organizations are more and more piling atop an impossibly high, increasingly disorganized and fragmented tower of knowledge without leaving formal markers and scaffolds to lead those who will come after them. How much of the knowledge that goes into manufacturing a modern car exists in a single resource called "How to build a 2020 car" ? hell scratch that, how much resources remotely detail how to build a single decent 90s-grade engine ? The fact that this is google is only tangentially related as it's only a subcase of the general problem that corporations hoard knowledge and research into proprietary "solutions" and "intellectual property": this would still be nearly just as dangerous if those building the chips were a bunch of highly-funded university researchers who know each other by name and are separated from the rest of humanity by billions of dollars of funding and literal lifetimes of knowledge that they're adding to without teaching to others. Not that I blame them (the words might sound as if I am), this is a far greater mess than any single one cause. It's an astonishingly underappreciated problem of modern civilization how black-boxy and fragmented it's institutions and knowledge have become.