The A.I. Cold War has Arrived

If the U.S. pushes China, it may be surprised what comes next.

Photo by Vivek Kumar on Unsplash

Hey Everyone,

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, has been warning China is getting ahead in A.I. for years.

The National Security Commission on AI believes that China could soon replace the U.S. as the world’s “AI superpower” and said there are serious military implications to consider. Other A.I. startups who are major clients of the National Defense sector are mimicking these claims. Apparently it’s profitable for some to start an A.I. cold-tech war.

The mandate of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence’s (NSCAI) is to make recommendations to the President and Congress to “advance the development of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and associated technologies to comprehensively address the national security and defense needs of the United States.”

But do we fully understand what an A.I. war means? It’s not all about “winning” someone should tell the ultra nationalists of the U.S. and China, the entire world is watching.

The United States and China are increasingly engaged in a competition over who will dominate the strategic technologies of tomorrow. This is in fact one of the reasons I started this Newsletter, A.I. Supremacy. It was on the belief and good faith that people like Eric Schmidt were good actors. But when it comes to the mixing of politics, greed and A.I., I am not so sure. That the financial elite of the U.S. want to profit from competition with China is pretty clear.

America misunderstands China and few American journalists have covered A.I. policy in a satisfactory way, one that I enjoy reading is Kate Kaye, may Protocol rest in peace. Cold-war rhetoric may not serve America this time, as bloated monopoly capitalism hides the truth of the situation.

Information warfare, corpore espionage, cybersecurity concerns and entertainment apps like TikTok are concerning. So is China’s increasing sophistication around its A.I. capabilities and quantum computing research. China isn’t just doing more research, it has considerably more A.I. startups, especially in the area of facial recognition supporting its complex social credit system and Surveillance Capitalism 2.0.

Even as artificial intelligence is contributing to an intensifying bilateral rivalry, it also is driving both countries to race out ahead of the rest of the world in innovation, economic growth, and overall national power. Moreover, the adoption of advanced technologies is hastening the arrival of intense societal disruptions in both countries. The U.S. is likely using competition with China to take attention away from automation, robots entering the workforce and the generally disruptive potential of trends like Generative A.I.