March 8, 2021 | US-China Competition In Artificial Intelligence (AI)
To Compete With China, Does the US Need To Become More Like China?
US-China Competition In Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Last week we considered the long-term impact of a prolonged US-China technology competition. As the Biden administration continues to adopt a modular approach to China, the US will devote more resources towards enhancing its own capabilities in advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence. We can contrast Biden’s approach with that of the previous administration, which focused heavily on attempting to neutralize China’s advanced technology capabilities while largely neglecting to nurture US capabilities.
To explore the potential future of US-China technology competition in the artificial intelligence (AI) domain, we turn to Fareed Zakaria’s interviewed former Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt to discuss The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence’s (NSCAI) expansive final report on its “strategy for winning the artificial intelligence era.”
We can’t cover the full NSCAI report today because it’s more than 750 pages long, but I intend to parse through the report's core components and present them in these notes throughout the rest of the week.
Schmidt’s interview with Zakaria condenses enough of the full report’s substance to be worth watching:
Schmidt, a billionaire technologist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist warns that the US will soon fall behind China in artificial intelligence. An event that the US should see as “a national emergency” and “a threat to our nation unless we get our act together with respect to focusing on AI in the federal government and in our national security.”
According to Schmidt:
“Artificial intelligence will be the basis of pretty much everything you deal with over the next five or ten years. It’ll be present in your information space, it’ll be present in your medical care, it will be present in how your car works. Over and over again AI will be a central part of the world, and in particular the United States.”
Underscoring Schmidt’s core argument: to counter China’s capabilities in advanced technologies, the United States must direct state capacity towards outcompeting China, not knee-capping China. This is a significant distinction and one we see elucidated in a report produced by another Eric Schmidt-led initiative, the China Strategy Group (CSG).
From the CSG memo:
“[Pivoting towards US-China technology competition] will require a more sophisticated approach that bolsters U.S. competitiveness without inviting escalatory cycles of confrontation, retaliation, or unintended conflict with China. Even as competition is the dominant frame, we should consider where cooperation, collaboration, and exchange with China is in our interest. The United States will also have to take care to avoid actions that, on balance, are counterproductive and undermine U.S. innovation by severing ties and closing off the United States to the ideas, people, technologies, and supply chains necessary to compete effectively.”
Returning to the Zakaria interview, Schmidt contends China owes its AI success to its ability to leverage state capacity and central planning to funnel data and resources to enhance artificial intelligence capabilities.
From Schmidt:
“The United States is not organized that way, which is why we propose the creation of a top-level panel that would be convened under the vice president” to focus on US global technology competitiveness.”
Schmidt is not wrong. China’s rapid economic and technological advancements over the past several decades are largely the result of China’s centralized, state-controlled models. These models worked well enough to position China as a rival superpower to the United States across multiple technological, economic, and geopolitical domains.
The problem is things get tricky if we view US-China technology competition from a purely technocratic perspective. Schmidt would be right to assert that adopting a highly-centralized, state-controlled model offers the US the best opportunity to outcompete China through the current decade and beyond. From a democratic perspective, it should be pretty obvious why it’s not a good idea to try to borrow too much from China.
Ultimately it’s hard to argue for a ‘correct’ approach to a US-China technology competition. Biden’s framing of US-China relations as a showdown between techno-democracy and techno-authoritarianism is not the worst option. It’s certainly better than the Trump administration’s strategy of sacrificing core national interests to pursue self-defeating confrontation.
We’ll continue focusing on this topic in future notes, and later this week will attempt to incorporate analysis from China’s annual parliamentary meetings Two Sessions 2021.
Additional Resources:
US-China Technology Competition
The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence — Final Report (NSCAI)
No comfortable historical reference captures the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on national security. AI is not a single technology breakthrough, like a bat-wing stealth bomber. The race for AI supremacy is not like the space race to the moon. AI is not even comparable to a general-purpose technology like electricity. However, what Thomas Edison said of electricity encapsulates the AI future: “It is a field of fields ... it holds the secrets which will reorganize the life of the world.” Edison’s astounding assessment came from humility. All that he discovered was “very little in comparison with the possibilities that appear.”
GPS Web Extra: Eric Schmidt on the race to 5G (CNN; Video)
Former Google head tells Fareed why the U.S. needs to invest in 5G infrastructure and semiconductor production in order to be competitive with China.
Asymmetric Competition: A Strategy for China & Technology Actionable Insights for American Leadership (CSG)
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash