The last time a rival power tried to out-innovate the U.S. and marshaled a whole-of-government approach to doing it, the Soviet Union startled Americans by deploying the first man-made satellite into orbit. The Sputnik surprise in 1957 shook American confidence, galvanized its government and set off a space race culminating with the creation of NASA and the moon landing 50 years ago this month.
Two years since announcing a national plan to become the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030, China is making progress toward its goal on an unprecedented scale, raising the question of whether America’s laissez-faire approach to technology is enough and whether another Sputnik moment is around the corner, according to interviews for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Global Translations podcast. Read More
Daily Archives: July 21, 2019
Why an “AI Race” Between the U.S. and China Is a Terrible, Terrible Idea
Perhaps because it lies at the perfect nexus of genuinely-very-complicated and impossibly-confounded-by-marketing-buzzword-speak, the term “AI” has become a catchall for anything algorithmic and sufficiently technologically impressive. AI, which is supposed to stand for “artificial intelligence,” now spans applications from cameras to the military to medicine.
One thing we can be sure about AI — because we are told it so often and at so increasingly high a pitch — is that whatever it actually is, the national interest demands more of it. And we need it now, or else China will beat us there, and we certainly wouldn’t want that, would we? What is “there,” exactly? What does it look like, how would it work, and how would it change our society? Irrelevant! The race is on, and if America doesn’t start taking AI seriously, we’re going to find ourselves the losers in an ever-widening Dystopia Gap. Read More
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