Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

I The South China Sea, fabled and contested, stretches from the Taiwan Strait south to the Java Sea and the Singapore Strait, where the Horsburgh lighthouse, an active relic of Asia’s violent encounter with Europe, now keeps watch over the world’s most crucial chokepoint. North of Singapore, the sea is bounded to the east by the island of Borneo, to the west by the Malay peninsula. As each of these land formations slopes away, the sea opens to a wide expanse. Wide, but frequently shallow, and dotted with cays, atolls, reefs, sand bars, and small island formations. For the vast commercial ships that transit this shipping lane, they must hew closely to well-charted but narrow routes where the sea lane is deep enough to accommodate their giant hulls. If you viewed the South China Sea simultaneously through satellite, radar, and sonar images, you would see a sea clogged with obstacles. There are the myriad islands and formations and shallows that constrain commercial passage. Across the remaining surface, every major shipping company in the world transits these waters, sailing mega-container ships, oil and natural gas tankers, grain ships and bulk carriers hauling copper, steel, and other industrial materials, and the “roll-on, roll-off” (or “ro-ro”) ships that move the world’s supply of cars and trucks from manufacturer to market. Several nations sail fishing fleets here, including two of the world’s largest, from China and Taiwan; according to the Ocean Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, fully half of the world’s fishing fleet spends some of the year trailing in these waters. Six countries have made sovereign claims here and are seeking to profit from the economic rights that follow (under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea), namely China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia. In the shallow waters of the eastern and western reaches of the sea, dozens of nationally and internationally owned companies are part of their projects to drill into the huge estimated reserves of oil and gas captured beneath the sands. Along this sea floor lies the world’s largest concentration of undersea cables, which carry more than ninety percent of all the data that powers the contemporary technological world. This is the busiest shipping lane in the world, the jugular of the world economy. You would be blithely unaware of any of this, though, while sailing the main shipping lane, for that route runs far afield of most of these dangers. You can sometimes sail for hours without catching sight of another ship, even at the height of day. Perhaps you see the distant silhouette of a container vessel far ahead, or the outline of an oil tanker just at the horizon. Your radar shows you the position of these and other vessels too far away to be seen even with the binoculars that are still a standard part of sea-farers kit. On most modern vessels the Automated Information System (AIS) allows you, with a tap of the cursor, to glean the name, the speed, and the direction of these vessels, though you still need the binoculars because many small or mid-size Chinese fishing vessels do not carry AIS beacons or turn them off. But to the naked eye the sea is calm and can be all but empty. That is, until you approach the Taiwan Strait. Here the sea narrows sharply, and the seabed rises dramatically, reaching no more than three hundred feet at its deepest. Shipping is squeezed into a narrow channel. And around you the world’s most dangerous arms race comes into plain view. To the west lies China, to the east the island of Taiwan. For a long period, it was known as Formosa—after ilha formosa, or “beautiful island,” per a Portuguese account in 1542 — less fabled than the surrounding sea, but even more contested through contemporary history. Populated for the better part of six thousand years, it became a Dutch colony in the mid-1600s, then an independent kingdom. It was annexed to the Qing dynasty in 1683, then ceded to Japan in 1895, under the Treaty of Shimonoseki that ended the first Sino-Japan war. The short-lived Republic of China (which overthrew the Qing Dynasty in 1912) took over Taiwan in 1945, at the request of its World War II allies. When the Chinese civil war turned against them, in 1949, the Republic of China’s government, having already been forced to move from Nanjing, relocated from Chengdu to Taipai. Thus was modern Taiwan born. It has been subject to threat and claim from China ever since. It occupies a critical geography. It forms an essential part of what John Foster Dulles conceived of as “the first island chain” — an arc of islands from which the United States could project power in Asia by which to contain Soviet and Chinese military action in the Pacific. In our day, the greater focus is on Chinese naval expansion, for the arc collectively encloses the Yellow Sea, East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and the South China Sea — what China calls its “Near Seas,” each of them bordering one of China’s major economic hubs. North of this arc is the Japanese main island, where an American naval base homeports the USS Ronald Reagan and its supporting destroyer squadron, and the Korean peninsula, where the United States maintains a large concentration of armed forces. The island chain formation itself runs from the Japanese island of Kyushu, where the United States operates the diplomatically named Fleet Activities Sasebo, a naval base home to the Japan Maritime Self Defense Forces and to several American ships, including amphibious assault vessels (like a small aircraft carrier) and America’s only forward-deployed expeditionary strike group. Southwest from Kyushu lies the Ryuku island arc, which encompasses Okinawa, home to not one but twenty-five American military installations, encompassing Marine and Air force capacities, along with smaller Army and Navy units. The lower arc of the Ryukus wraps around the Senkaku Island group (described