Dealing realistically with the artificial intelligence revolution
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 All1: “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 writers2 around the world (even when the articles under those headlines explain why the competition in AI technologies really is not an arms race).3
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