LAUSR

The world is engaged in a competition for leadership in the array of technologies and applications often grouped under the umbrella of artificial intelligence. This competition has often been compared to the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, but the comparison is misleading on many fronts. Artificial intelligence is not one technology but many, and those technologies may be used in a wide variety of classifying, optimizing, and predictive applications, many and probably most not military in nature. Unlike the US Manhattan Project and the Soviet Union’s equally secretive early nuclear program, AI research is done in both the private and public sectors; information about private sector research is regularly shared among participants in the field and, therefore, among countries. Progress is rapid, and knowledge about that progress is seldom contained to one country alone. But the dissimilarity between today’s AI research programs and the highly secretive, government-controlled efforts that led to 60,000 nuclear weapons in the 1980s does not mean warnings about an AI arms race now are rare. In 2017, for instance, Russian President Vladimir Putin described the AI race in martial terms, as if he were Sauron, the dark lord of Middle-earth, seeking The One Ring to Rule them All: “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.” The term “AI arms race” also seems to have a natural attraction for news headline writers around the world (even when the articles under those headlines explain why the competition in AI technologies really is not an arms race). But if it does not constitute an arms race per se, the worldwide competition in AI research and development does present the world with tricky ethical choices, particularly in the military arena – and a huge management problem. Clearly, some combinations of AI algorithms, robotics, and other emergent technologies – killer robots that choose their targets independent of human control, for example – may pose extraordinary dangers to humanity. Other applications involving one of more of the technologies in the AI basket, however, could and likely will provide the world with almost magical benefits, detecting, for example, diseases that doctors would miss, thereby saving countless lives, and guiding driverless cars that kill many thousands of fewer people than human-steered vehicles. Directing fast-moving and decentralized AI research in positive directions, while minimizing its potentially enormous negative potentials, is almost certainly the most difficult “dual-use” technology challenge the world has faced to date. For this issue, we asked four highly regarded experts for their views on the global AI competition. In “The frame problem: The AI ‘arms race’ isn’t one,” University of Cambridge researcher Heather M. Roff explains why using an arms race orientation when discussing the global competition in the AI field is not only fundamentally inaccurate, but potentially dangerous. “[T]alking about technological competition – in research, adoption, and deployment – in all sectors of multiple economies and in warfare is not really an arms race. Indeed, to frame this competition in military terms risks the adoption of policies or regulations that could escalate rivalry between states and increase the likelihood of actual conflict,” Roff writes. Cyberspace scholar Chris C. Demchak agrees that AI competition does not qualify, in itself, as an arms race. But in its rivalry with the United States, a rising, authoritarian China focused on technological supremacy may threaten freedom of expression, human rights, and democratic self-government around the world, Demchak suggests in her article, “China: determined to dominate cyberspace and AI.” “The rise of AI, a subset of cyber – as well as machine learning, quantum computing, and other new technologies – does not herald a new arms race so much as an enhanced, possibly exponentially accelerated, underlying competition between rising China and the United States,” Demchak notes. “Given the dual nature of most cyber tools, those worried about an AI arms race should rather be more concerned about the profound disruption to the existing global order that China’s rise to the top of the cyber pack could pose.” Brenda Leong, senior counsel and director of strategy at the Washington, DC-based think tank Future of Privacy Forum, sees a more generalized threat to