Artifacts of a Busy Week

A debate on superintelligence, an essay on liability, and Congressional testimony

Recently I alerted my followers on X that posts on Hyperdimensional would become more sporadic over the coming weeks due to a combination of many writing projects and the (knock on wood) birth of our first child, a baby boy, next month. Today, therefore, I will be sharing some material I’ve produced elsewhere, all of which I think may be of interest.

First, I debated Future of Life Institute President and MIT Professor Max Tegmark on Liron Shapira’s Doom Debates podcast. We discussed FLI’s Superintelligence Statement, AI regulation, and the trajectory of AI. Watch here.

Second, I wrote a piece in Big Think’s progress-themed special on the history of the U.S. liability system in technology governance. Read here.

Finally, yesterday I was a witness at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on South and Central Asia on semiconductor manufacturing equipment export controls. Below I’ve copied my spoken opening statement. Here is a link to my full testimony, and here is a link to the full hearing.

Talk to you next week.

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Chairman Huizenga, Ranking Member Kamlager-Dove, and distinguished members of the subcommittee:

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today on this vitally important topic. My name is Dean Ball. I am a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, where I focus on AI, emerging technologies, public policy, and geostrategy. The views I express in this testimony are my own and should not be construed as representing the official position of the Foundation for American Innovation or any other organization with whom I have a current or prior affiliation.

In July 2019, during his first term, President Trump successfully persuaded the Dutch government to block sales of extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines to Chinese semiconductor companies. These machines are the result of a tremendous range of scientific breakthroughs and technological miracles—employing lasers, for example, whose precision is akin to hitting a hole-in-one on the Moon from Earth, to paint sub-microscopic electrical circuits with light onto razor-thin wafers made of processed sand.

At the time, these lithography machines—made exclusively by the Dutch company ASML—were not widely known outside of the semiconductor industry and its close observers. But President Trump’s decision would prove wise and forward-looking: within a few short years, ASML and their lithography technology became known the world over as key inputs in the manufacturing of advanced semiconductors. Today, it is widely believed that these controls represent the single most important technological chokepoint preventing China from manufacturing leading-edge semiconductors.

Of course, since 2022 the United States has also imposed export controls on the advanced semiconductors most relevant to AI. The wisdom and prudence of these controls has been the subject of vigorous debate in recent months, but that is not my focus today. Instead, I want to focus on the issue President Trump identified in 2019: semiconductor manufacturing equipment. And the reality I wish to convey to you is stark: there are large gaps in current semiconductor manufacturing export controls today, and these gaps have meaningfully enabled China’s rapid progress in advanced semiconductor manufacturing in recent years.

We have set on the path of denying China access to the most sophisticated machines in the world—advanced AI compute. But we have failed to deny access to something perhaps even more important: the machines that make the machines. It should be no surprise, then, that China has managed to significantly advance its semiconductor manufacturing industry considerably even in light of our export controls.

I want to emphasize that the U.S. has constructed a sound export control regime for semiconductor manufacturing equipment made by domestic companies. Our major shortcoming, instead, is that we have struggled to harmonize those controls with allies whose local companies compete with our own, and who sometimes hold near-monopolies over the production of certain equipment.

This lack of international harmonization can result in insufficient controls on equipment that is short of the cutting edge, but still advanced. Perhaps the best example of this is deep ultraviolet immersion lithography machines, the predecessor to extreme ultraviolet lithography. Like EUV machines, these are made almost exclusively by the Dutch company ASML. These machines can be used to manufacture both legacy chips, such as those at the 28-nanometer node, and near-cutting-edge chips that fall within U.S. export controls, such as those on the 7-nanometer node.

Our lack of international harmonization on export controls creates additional problems as well. In many cases, for example, U.S. firms are tightly export controlled even when their foreign competitors are not. American companies like Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA make complex tools for etching, deposition, cleaning, and metrology—all important parts of the semiconductor manufacturing process. Export of these tools to Chinese firms is largely forbidden by U.S. export controls. Yet the export of tools that are functionally the same from companies like Tokyo Electron—a Japanese company—is permitted.

Unsurprisingly, the result is that the China sales of foreign competitors have jumped after U.S. export controls, suggesting that American firms are being denied revenue while critical technology flows into China nonetheless. This is the worst of both worlds: our firms bear the cost of the policy, but the policy itself fails because our allies do not coordinate with us.

Two policy tools are at our disposal: one is diplomacy. Diplomatic efforts have been ongoing since the 2022 imposition of export controls during the Biden Administration, and continue under the Trump Administration. If these efforts do not succeed, it is essential that policymakers employ the second tool: the Foreign Direct Product Rule. This allows the U.S. to impose export controls on foreign-made goods if they contain or are directly made with U.S. technology. Both options should be on the table, with an aim toward resolving as many of these gaps as feasible in the near term.

Thank you.