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Opinion
As US, China and Russia fight for AI supremacy in new hyperwar battlefield, will good sense prevail?
- In this ‘who dares wins’ race, the US has a lead in deep-learning algorithms but China and Russia are making greater strides in applications, unencumbered by privacy or rights concerns
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Daniel Wagner is the CEO of Country Risk Solutions and has more than three decades of experience assessing cross-border risk.
Will artificial intelligence (AI) ever possess the nuance, intuition, and gut instinct necessary to be a good military or intelligence analyst? The jury will be out on that question for some time, but the world’s leading governments continue to develop AI with military applications under the presumption that, eventually, machines will possess that ability. China, Russia, and the United States are in a race to determine which country will dominate the AI landscape first.
China and Russia have had a free hand in applying the technology, unburdened by concerns about privacy, civil rights or degrees of presumed acceptability. China has excelled at developing AI via a vast number of well-trained computer engineers who programme machines using an unrivalled amount of data, produced by the country’s 1.4 billion people. And Russia has little hesitation about deploying AI in any number of instruments of war, including hypersonic weapons.
In contrast, the US sees AI principally as a national security tool, to be employed on the battlefield or to thwart terrorist attacks, and trails both countries in some aspects of the development of deployable machines. The manner in which it allocates and spends defence dollars tends to be slow and cumbersome – not conducive to speed or efficiency. That has hobbled the US in reacting swiftly, effectively and proactively in response to some cyberattacks, and has thwarted the development of cutting-edge AI tools.
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