Welcome back to our regular Friday feature, The Future in Five Questions. Today, we have Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and chairman of the think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator, whose insights into emerging technologies, foreign policy, and national security have made him a leading voice on issues ranging from Chinese cyberwarfare to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. What’s one big underrated idea? The threat of the Chinese invasion of Taiwan is an underappreciated risk by most people out there. China seems to be inching slowly but surely towards that goal, and we have not come to terms with it. Taiwan, specifically, has not come to terms with it and has not taken the necessary steps to make sure that that invasion never actually occurs. So we need to get serious, [and] the Taiwanese need to get serious, because a war over Taiwan that inevitably will draw in the United States will change our entire world, even in a way that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has not. What’s a technology you think is overhyped? It’s blockchain. We're now 12 or 13 years since the invention of blockchain, and we're still waiting for any useful use cases where that technology can actually be applied to solve real-world problems. I'm not talking about cryptocurrency, which is still mostly a speculative asset. Over the last decade, people were saying that this technology is going to be applied to solve all sorts of problems, from cybersecurity to real estate and financial markets. And the reality is that it hasn't done pretty much any of those things. What book most shaped your conception of the future? So there's a terrific book I read as a child — it's actually a play — called The Dragon by Soviet playwright Evgeny Schwartz. And it is an allegory, not unlike Animal Farm from [George] Orwell, that is written as a fairy tale, where you have a story of a knight called Lancelot that arrives into a town that is ruled by a brutal dragon, and he sets out to kill the dragon but finds that the population of this town that is ruled by this authoritarian dictator, the dragon, actually does not want the dragon to die and is resisting his efforts to slay it. And when he finally does, yet another dictator comes in to replace the slain dragon. And it's a powerful message about the power of totalitarianism and how many people around the world actually don’t want freedom and are comfortable living under a brutal dictatorship as long as their most basic needs are still met. What could government be doing regarding tech that it isn’t? It’s really about semiconductors. We’ve made the right steps last month to invest in domestic semiconductor production to make sure that we’re not losing this race in the most critical technology out there to China. Semiconductors have often been called the new oil — the oil of the 21st century. I actually think that’s a misguided characterization, because there are alternatives to oil. There is no alternative to chips. They’re irreplaceable to the modern economy. What we need to be doing, in addition to investing in domestic production — and our allies need to be doing the same — is working to also slow down China. The reality is that we cannot match Chinese levels of government investments, which is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The CHIPS Act is only around $75 billion with tax breaks. And we cannot match their capacity to produce workers to work cheaply in those plants. But China today still relies on Western equipment technologies, without which it cannot build a single fab, no matter whether it’s a fab for advanced chips or even legacy chips. And we need to look seriously at export controls to limit China’s ability to procure that equipment. There are two ways to win a race. One is to run faster than the adversary. The other is to slow them down. And we need to be doing both. What has surprised you most this year? It did not surprise me that Russia invaded, but the incompetence with which they they invaded did surprise me. They had an enormous advantage in fires and armor and manpower over Ukraine during those initial weeks, and they squandered it all because of the incompetence of their plan and the secrecy with which they planned this invasion, where their own troops weren’t even told what was going to happen. And that doomed this war from the start.
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