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Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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An intriguing study of how artificial intelligence is the new frontier for the rivalry between the U.S. and China. Well, didn't get any kills. Didn't get any kills. I mean shooting, but didn't actually hit anything. And so the wild thing to me though was that the AI was able to use tactics that humans can't do. So it wasn't just that it was better, it's that it fights differently than people. Now in this case, what the AI did was make these superhuman gunshots when the aircraft are racing at each other head to head, for aviation enthusiasts, forward-quarter gunshots, which are not only basically impossible for humans because there's a split second where there's an opportunity to make these shots, they're actually banned in training because they're dangerous for humans to even try because the air crafts are racing each other hundreds of miles an hour. So that gives an example of how AI has an opportunity to not just be better than people, but open up new ways of operating, new ways of war fighting. And that kind of disruptive change is exactly the kind of thing that U.S. military needs to be in the forefront of.

There’s also a concern that countries may not be investing enough in making sure their systems are safe, which potentially could be destabilizing by risking accidents or some kind of unintended escalation in the crisis. The balloon incident is a good example of this, where the latest information out of the U.S. government is that the balloon may have initially been blown off course. It highlights this challenge that militaries can often have of controlling uncrewed or unmanned systems once they’re released. Since the late 1990s, second-generation AI has produced some remarkable breakthroughs on the basis of big data, massive computing power, and algorithms. There were three seminal events. On May 11 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion. In 2011, IBM’s Watson won Jeopardy!. Even more remarkably, in March 2016, AlphaGo beat the world champion Go player, Lee Seedol, 4-1. In his book, Scharre breaks down the international contest for AI predominance into four battlegrounds: data, talent, computing hardware and institutions. And he assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the major players — foremost the U.S. and China, and to a lesser extent the European Union — in each area, finding a parity between the two leading nations in the field.We need to focus on the things that really matter. The two things that matter where the U.S. has a huge asymmetric advantage over China are hardware and talent, and we need to find ways to maintain those advantages and to double down on them when we can. So expanding high skilled immigration, making sure that we're bringing the best and brightest from around the world, and keeping U.S. companies in the lead in some of these critical choke points for semiconductor technology. We don't need to compete on everything with semiconductors with China. We don't need to worry about trying to ... Competing at every single kind of chip at every component. What we need to focus on is maintaining a hub of leading edge manufacturing here in the United States so that we can have U.S. companies at these critical choke points, so that we can control China's access to the most advanced hardware in the future. I think there’s value in people finding ways to embrace the technology, where it might be useful or increase productivity. The caveat is that it does sometimes make things up, so you shouldn’t trust it.

China plays a major role in the book, given its major investments and implementation of AI. How did it come to this, with the U.S. and China squaring off on a technological, futuristic battleground? This book will likely help the military keep from falling too far behind in its understanding of AI. But I would also imagine these technologies can go to the heart of the organizational culture of particular services. You mentioned World War II and the question of developing aircraft carriers. I know part of the inhibition was for navies. There was a element of the Navy that liked battle ships and saw aircraft carriers as basically something new and trivial, not new and transformational. And you tell this wonderful story about a startup company that ends up competing in a DOD competition with fighter aircraft. And at the end, they pit this algorithm, machine learning, whatever it is, against a human pilot. And the algorithm basically defeated one of the best pilots the Pentagon had in a face-to-face simulated match. But that would suggest that if machine learning is so good that it can basically outthink humans, then why do you need a man in the loop or a man in your F-35? But I could imagine if I go to my friends in the Air Force and say, "Hey, we don't need pilots anymore," that seems to run counter to their organization. So institutions are the organizations that are going to affect how countries adopt AI and employ them. And we can see throughout history that what matters more than getting technology first or even having the best technology is finding the best ways of using it. So if you look at aircraft technology, the fact that airplanes were invented in the United States gave the U.S. no meaningful advantage by the time you get to World War II. What mattered much more was figuring out, what do you do with an airplane? How do you use airplanes effectively? And all of the great powers at the time, they had access to airplane technology, there were lots of different experimentations about how to employ airplanes effectively. If you look at carrier aviation, the U.S. and Japan were able to innovate effectively and employ aircraft on aircraft carriers to change naval warfare. Great Britain had access to the same technology, and they stumbled not because of their technology, but because of bureaucratic and cultural squabbles within the British military, and they fell behind in carrier aviation. Pilots take some heat for this in the military because automation in drones has been able to physically replace what pilots do, in terms of enabling remotely piloted aircraft. Over time, with more autonomous features, it’ll increasingly hand over the piloting of the plane itself so that pilots are in supervisory capacity, which is a good thing from a military standpoint.PDF / EPUB File Name: Four_Battlegrounds_-_Paul_Scharre.pdf, Four_Battlegrounds_-_Paul_Scharre.epub And, you know, the behavior of some of the major companies here has not exactly been super responsible. And so we're already seeing with Open AI, and Microsoft, and Google saw the rush over the last couple months to hastily deploy AI chatbots that were not at all ready and the companies responding to each other in this competitive dynamic that's really harmful, this sort of race to the bottom on safety.

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