It's a well-recognized refrain in tech boardrooms and government corridors: China is aggressively difficult America to a synthetic intelligence arms race. Whoever wins will control the geopolitical landscape – and the worldwide economy – for generations.
for years, Pentagon officials and tech luminaries like Eric Schmidt, Peter ThielAnd Alex Karp have parroted this doomsday scenario.
But the narrative doesn't hold water.
It's convincing Proof The China's AI capabilities were overestimated. Although Chinese technologies have evolved rapidly, they don’t pose a direct threat to national security. Remember alternative perspective from retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan: ““Sometimes it feels like with AI we are dangerously close to making the same flawed assessment of the ‘bomber-missile gap’ that we did with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.”
The Cold War era bomber–Missile gap was illusory, however it triggered a nuclear arms race with devastating political, environmental and psychological consequences. It was also extraordinarily expensive, reportedly costing American taxpayers $5.8 trillion an estimate. That’s greater than $11 trillion today.
A rational geopolitical evaluation should consider China's challenges. Of the country The economy has slowed For 20 years, there is no such thing as a end in sight. A demographic decline will halve China's population by the tip of the century. A Brain drain attracts talented Chinese researchers to Australia, Canada and the European Union. As the outgoing President of Taiwan said Tsai Ing-wen last fallChina is simply too burdened with domestic problems to invade Taiwan.
Then why does the concept have one Catastrophic battle between “AI superpowers” seized? The answer is deceptively easy: for some, war is profitable. Even more essential is preparation for algorithmic warfare.
The Chinese AI threat narrative increases and serves to justify and speed up the Pentagon's demand for high-tech weapons, surveillance and logistics systems US spending on defense technology, while government AI research is being targeted towards military slightly than civilian purposes. Tech corporations are lining up to assert their share of the Defense Department's $886 billion annual budget — and not only giants like that Amazon, Microsoft, GoogleAnd Palantirbut additionally lots of of Silicon Valley Venture capital-backed defense technology startups.
These corporations also do business with foreign militaries, including Google $1.2 billion contract Cooperation with the Israeli Ministry of Defense has sparked protests amongst employees appalled by the corporate's support for the war in Gaza. Google fired 28 employees over protests earlier this week.
These changes alter the character of the military-industrial complex. In 1961, President Eisenhower warned Americans that unrestricted defense spending threatened democracy by giving defense contractors “unwarranted influence” over Congress.
That still applies today. Dozens of former Pentagon officials now work for enterprise capital firms. The “Revolving doorThe conflict between the Pentagon and personal industry continues to be teetering, but military officials are as prone to lean toward Silicon Valley investment firms as they’re toward Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, or other “traditional” defense contractors.
While such practices could also be acceptable for consumer products, there may be way more at stake when Silicon Valley's startup model is applied to military products particularly AI enabled weapon and monitoring systems that make unpredictable decisionsor fail when the operating environment changes. The use of inadequately tested technologies will end in the deaths of innocent people and the deaths of American troops.
If the pace of development and deployment of military AI weapons and surveillance systems continues to speed up, the tip result shall be an expensive arsenal of flawed, unreliable and dangerous technologies that don’t work as advertised.
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