Seems like there’s one or two multinational corporations at the bottom of the supply chain granting us the ability to manufacture semiconductors. Precision engineering that spits in the face of God. What’s the bus factor on the knowledge required to produce these? Companies forget how to make things they used to know how to make. It happens all the time. What happens when their institutional knowledge decays? We just can’t make the computers that run MRI machines anymore?
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.