Techno-Nationalism

Chapter 13The AI Arms Race

An artificial intelligence (AI) arms race is widening the competitive arena among nations and spilling over into all aspects of life.

As leading-edge AI performs increasingly complex cognitive tasks on a unimaginable scale and at speeds that defy human comprehension, governments and corporations—and even private individuals—have come to covet its powers.

In a Darwinian sense, both in terms of the evolution of the human species as a whole and in the competition between nations, there is a terrifying duality to AI. It has the potential to solve our most complex, wicked problems and level the playing field for hundreds of millions of people, but it can also widen the chasm between the meek and the powerful.

Discussions about AI, therefore, are eventually drawn to a Hobbesian perspective. We must remind ourselves that the international system, absent enforceable frameworks of rules, is fundamentally a nasty and brutish place.

Broadly defined, AI is an area of computer science that seeks to create intelligent machines that can mimic human capabilities. AI is no one single thing. It encompasses machine learning as well as the neural networks that recognise language symbols, words and images.

AI can pick out meaningful patterns in data as well as make complex predictions as it contemplates billions of parameters. Think of these parameters as a machine’s practical frame of reference as it teaches itself. Incredibly, today’s open AI platforms deal with hundreds ...