Even without a singularity, 2050 is unimaginably far away. 2050 is as far from 2021, as 2021 is from 1992, a time when there was no mass Internet, no smartphones, no 9/11, Japan was America's big economic rival, China was still debating whether to continue economic reform, the Soviet Union had just ceased to exist and the European Union had just begun to exist. Half the world population of 2021 wasn't even alive in 1992. 

Sorry, but I'll comment on a meta level. I find the topic interesting and am interested in reading such discussions; but may I ask the admins what the current policy regarding frontpaging politics is? Last time I checked, It seemed that the rule was that only Zvi is allowed to write politics for the frontpage... Now the post already starts off with a subjective worldview and presents it as objective (e.g. the "interests" of the US that are stated as facts without evidence or discussion; the "liberal world order (LWO), also known as the 'rules-based international order'" is presented as an objectively existing thing, the US is claimed to unambiguously protect it, and to have designed it "to maximize economic and political power of the United States"). I don't mind forum posts and discussions on that level, but I have a preference for consistency. So just to be sure: Is this kind of politics discussion now encouraged?

Hiding an aircraft carrier battle group on the open sea isn't possible.

Whoa. That's.. not true? Maybe in thirty years if radar + imaging gets dramatically better, but.. As bean says, it's a big ocean, and very easy to hide in inclement weather with drones and electronic counter-warfare and automated point-defence systems that are already very good and etc. The "carriers are doomed" still seems to be quite a controversial contention.

When it comes to space I think Tungsten rods will play an important part.

I would nudge your assessment of the missile defense capabilities of aircraft carriers up a bit. Part of the reason the Iron Dome doesn't intercept everything is because Hamas launches a large number of rockets at the same time to overwhelm the system. This is easier to do when the rockets are cheap and the target distances are short. A comparable number of anti ship missiles are probably harder to fire simultaneously without deploying a large air fleet, in which case you are kind of meeting the carrier on its own terms. Longer range strikes also means greater time for detection and reaction. I also don't know how that 90-95% figure counts rockets that were intentionally not shot down since their trajectories ended in empty areas. I still think your overall assessment is correct though; it is probably much cheaper to sink an aircraft carrier than defend it, in both money and personnel. And the greatest cost to both parties would be from cyber attacks on civilian or mixed use systems.

Your points about Taiwan's lack of preparation are interesting. Could preparing for guerrilla resistance be seen as accepting a Chinese invasion and occupation as inevitable? I don't know much about Taiwan but I would guess proposing that to be career suicide for most politicians or military officers.

My understanding of the present state of Taiwan is that they are unprepared for war in any real sense. Sure, they've bought a decent amount of American military technology, but that seems to be it.

Total war requires the preparation of the entire populace. Taiwan has not done this, and I doubt the present government intends to do so. Not only do you basically have to train your populace in terrorism, you also need to equip them with caches of a variety of weapons, entirely outside of government control.

Azerbaijan and Armenia's recent war shows just how the game has changed. Armenia had a much more capable and better-trained infantry. Azerbaijan had the latest in drone technology. "Guerrillas hiding in the mountains" don't fare well against combined-arms forces with FLIR-equipped drones.

The defensive proposition of total war is that you force any would-be invader to kill most, if not all, of the local population to achieve victory. Both during the initial invasion, as well as during at least a full generation of occupation.

In essence, you leave only two options on the table: "Leave us in peace" or "In exchange for us inflicting massive casualties upon your forces, you will receive what remans of a barren rock full of refugees, along with at least one full generation of terrorism levied against your people by ours. As a bonus, we are both native speakers of the same language and lack any visual ethnic distinction. Isn't that fun?"

A few selected thoughts :

1. The number on the US invasion of Afghanistan may explain why it was such a failure. With 10^6 soldiers instead of 10^5 they would probably have been able to really secure the country.
2. I think a protracted war is unlikely because I expect the US to just give up on Taiwan.
3. Expansionism is something that grows on you. After China invades Taiwan, I guess they may become interested in securing some form of control over say Singapore, or Vietnam. The fact that they are not expansionist now does not mean they will not be expansionist then.
4. I think a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is likely to happen way before 2050.

For every hack we hear about there are many hacks we don't hear about. When you break into an adversary's computer network the first thing you want to do is establish persistence. Most of those hacks we don't hear about probably establish persistence. I would be surprised if China and the United States hadn't established persistence in most of each others' critical systems.

You may have misspoken, but this sounds confused. If you're just attempting to accomplish one thing and don't intend to come back to use their systems again, persistence strictly makes you easier to detect because it involve planting some kind of C2/agent software, generating new creds/tickets, or placing some intentional vulnerability that someone at the organization may eventually stumble upon. It's only if you're planning on exploiting the same thing over and over, that it's safer and cheaper to establish persistence. Planting stealthy persistence in really "core" systems that are part of an intranet and aren't just directly connected to the web is actually a bit of an engineering challenge, although I would say it's one that favors attackers, especially nation state attackers or nolifers that can develop their own tooling.

In the event of a hot war between the United States and China, both sides will burn most of their zero-days immediately to cause as much disruption to the enemy as possible. It takes a lot of work to clean a hacker out of one of your systems. The cyber onslaught will probably overwhelm both sides' ability to reset their software. They will have to focus on the most critical systems of all: communications.

It's really hard to predict things about cybersecurity 30+ years into the future, but this is probably anachronistic. Just over the last 5-10 years, zero day vulnerabilities for popular platforms like Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS have been monotonically increasing in complexity and cost to build. In recent years especially, the response by the big vendors like Apple to new zero days developed by security researchers or found in the wild has been pretty serious. Broad mitigations and defense in depth have turned a one genius & 3 month problem into a five genius & 6 month problem. In thirty years, assuming we aren't using completely different computing platforms, making the traditional zero-click 0days will be virtually impossible. 

At least for now I am worried about:

• Traditional "assume breach" models of security that protect things like corporate AD evironments. Malware & C2 developers have always been ahead of defensive solutions in this arena and I can't see any reason that will stop being the case in the future.
• The proliferation of critical embedded systems that, for performance reasons, won't have the same memory protections that larger devices are getting. Router & "IoT" RCEs have remained at the same ~10k$ price for nearly fifteen years because anybody with decent systems understanding and >135 IQ can make one in a few weeks. 
• Application-specific web vulnerabilities. So far the web has been almost a perpetual minefield of new classes of bugs, to the point where I think it's getting beyond reasonable to expect most web developers to have a good understanding of them. And web interfaces are starting to get put on nearly every system of importance, so as a result nearly everything is becoming vulnerable.
• The rise of waterholing attacks that amplify all of the above by infecting important downstream libraries/ubiquitous system software/etc.

The interesting thing about these techniques though is that they look a lot less like "nuclear"-0days that are developed by John Von Neumann and can just be used to break into anything, than "conventional" attacks. In the outbreak of a conventional war where both sides are directly targeting civilian infrastructure, cell towers, etc. of large technologically advanced nations, this makes the battle a lot more numbers heavy than I think either side will be anticipating. The situation right now is a little like if we had invented fighter jets after nuclear bombs; sometimes I imagine larger nation states might have developed TOPGUN-style A-teams to use sparingly but seen little point in training large cadres of F-35 pilots as a precaution for a hot war, because they've never known a hot war from a peer adversary while the tech existed. I think the military is making a serious mistake in not training reserves of B-tier computer hackers for a situation like this, where we're just trying to sabotage & protect as much as we can. If neither side figures this out, I would expect lots of low value targets to stay in place, at least at the start of the war.

I expect all but the most secure systems (think "US president's personal phone") will be entirely compromised. However, there are many ways to communicate. Both sides can improvise. Since secondary channels abound, it might be better just to spy on enemy communications instead of breaking them.

To be clear, if they literally took out the internet, the U.S. and China can still use specialized assisted-theorem-proven devices to transmit & receive AES-encrypted numbers over radio, WW2 style. Semi "proven-safe" code already exists for some much more complicated weapon systems in planes and helicopters and I expect that a lot of it is actually secure. Those communication platforms will probably be the simplest information system for a competent military to keep safe from hackers in a wartime environment.

Why would the Beijing government invade Taiwan? Couldn't it get most of what it wants by taking control of the airspace and shipping lanes around Taiwan?

China's interests have been basically unchanged since 1978. Its primary objective is to maintain internal domestic stability i.e. prevent regime change.
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China has prospered under the [Liberal World Order]. Rather than establishing broad international coalitions, China tends to pursue its interests bilaterally. With a few exceptions (like the dispute over the South China Sea) China is content to play according to the rules of the LWO.

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Of all the potential points of conflict, the obvious ones are Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Great, there's no reason for the US to fight China over control of sea and land next to China. The sooner the US realizes this, the safer and more prosperous we all, and the LWO, will be.

Hiding an aircraft carrier battle group on the open sea isn't possible.

This think tank disagrees.

I'm going to add one bit of armchair analysis as to what Taiwan could do in this situation. 

Look right here : https://www.google.com/maps/@23.7736383,117.0195051,525664m/data=!3m1!1e3

Do you notice how within 450 miles/700 kilometers there is the Hong Kong/Shenzhen/Macao/Guangzhoa metroplex?

Eyeballing it or we can check GDP, but that integrated region likely has comparable true economic value to all of Taiwan.  It is more or less parity.

And for ballistic missiles/stealth cruise missiles/low flying aircraft it's basically at point blank range.  Flight times could be mere minutes.

Taiwan just has to make themselves about 10 fission devices and they can threaten to do about as much damage as the value of their entire territory in retaliation.  

They have the capability.

I know it would be complicated but I have to ask whether you have a guess about India and Russia. India has ties with the US. But on the other hand, their water supply (from Tibbet) is under Chinese authority. They may also have common interests with China (India needs technology and money, which China could offer too). Russia is neither too populous nor an economic leviathan but has a vast land, many nuclear missiles, and a well-equipped army (which will fail to keep up with the USA or China). So Russia is a game-changer too (agree?). Which side are they more likely to pick?

This all seems pretty sensible.

The United States and China aren't expansionary powers

How long do you think it would take for China to go from its current level of expansionism to a level that would make war with the US plausibly worthwhile?  Could it happen in a generation, and what might precipitate it?  I'm thinking about Weimar Germany to Nazi Germany, or (the reverse) Imperial Japan to Solid-State Electronics Japan.

The Uighur ethnic cleansing is Han (versus "Chinese" more generally, since the Uighurs are citizens of PRC) expansionism, right?  Might that become more widespread and aggressive? 

(Contra, there's not much worth owning in southeast Asia or the Stan countries, and Russia would oppose outside influence in former Soviet states, based on past and current behavior.)  

What about taking over the Korean peninsula? Wouldn't be the first time. If China controlled DPRK's territory, which I assume they could at will, they could much more easily get troops into ROK than the U.S. could, especially if your view on missile-based ocean-area denial is correct. The 30,000 U.S. troops in ROK would have no realistic hope of reinforcement so long as neither side had air or sea superiority.  Does POTUS order them to fight to the last soldier, hoping that 30,000 dead or captured would motivate the country to fight back, or negotiate a peaceful retreat and withdrawal from ROK?  I guess it depends on who's POTUS.  

I bet the modern PRC could stop another Operation Chromite literally dead in the water. If nothing else, spotting an incoming sea assault is so much easier than it was in 1950.

These same issues would apply if China attacked Japan.

I think one factor that was overlooked as a potential for conflict is the developments by Russia and the ongoing push by China to be involved in the Arctic. As you mentioned they are interested in material collection and with the melting ice caps this unleashes a plentiful lot, along with new shipping routes. They have been granted an observer seat on the arctic council and with more military activity in the north with Russia and the rest of the arctic powers, it is not far off that this area will become more engaged here. 

I doubt population size is really a good metric for estimating odds for a battle/invasion. Used to be that the rule of thumb was the attacking force needed 3 times the forces of the defender.  In the case of Taiwan one might think a higher ratio would be required for many of the same reasons you suggest carriers are essentially sunk costs in a war.

I'm also not sure I agree with your assessment of interests or how long their agenda has been in place. There is that whole century of shame/humiliation its been looking to payback and allow a return to its rightful place as the apex culture. It has also been an imperial culture and polity for much, much longer than it's been democratic or socialist/communist. 

With regards to it largely playing by the LWO rules I think that is also rather questionable. It has used its position and acceptance into the UN and other international organizations well to lay the ground work for where they are today. It did so by not playing within the spirit of the rules and often not even within the letter of the rules. But that was just long experience with bureaucratic structures and using them to further imperial goals.

Taiwan already conscripts all qualified males. It should be training them in guerrilla warfare. This is not happening. Taiwan should also have weapons caches and underground bunkers strewn all over the island. It doesn't.

That is quite interesting. I'd gathered a vague impression from Tyler Cowan talking to Audrey Tang and Taiwan's general bang-up handling of covid that the Taiwanese gov has decent capacity and competence. Any thoughts why they would leave these obvious ideas on the table?

I know this is about the US and China, but you can't leave India out of the picture. "the string of pearls" is another route for Chinese expansion which would bring it into conflict with India.