Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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The Partnership on AI, a non-profit focused on establishing ethical standards and practices for the rapidly growing technology that features, well, pretty much everybody that matters in tech, released yesterday a guide for “Responsible Practices in Synthetic Media.”

The one country we haven't mentioned here is Taiwan, and you've likened Taiwan to being the Saudi Arabia of compute. Help me understand that. And you're making this reference to Chinese faces because China has been at the cutting edge of developing surveillance technologies that rely on facial recognition, correct? That's a great point. I think we should have reservations about AI technology because there are a lot of problems with AI technology today: it's unreliable, it is often very brittle in the sense that the AI systems can do well in some contexts and then it can fail often quite dramatically in others. This book really covers a ton of amazing topics and really gets some great arguments and key points about the use of AI and the potential future we all face Okay. Let's talk about the fourth pillar, institutions. What do you mean by institutions, and how are they essential to the outcome of this competition?

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Another really important example in the book is how companies kowtow to China - for example, China requested a whole bunch of companies, specifically airlines, that they list Taiwan as a province of China. One of the companies that fell for this is Air Canada. Scharre wants us to believe that China and the US in a close competition to militarize AI. I feel almost as uncertain about this as I was before reading the book.

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. Okay. So let's talk about computing power, or I guess the term of art is compute. It's a little awkward to talk about it in that way, but let's talk about compute. Who has the lead when it comes to compute?Despite examples of AI’s stupendous capacities in simulated combat, described in detail in Four Battlegrounds, it’s this kind of unpredictable behavior that raises the question of whether AI should be anywhere near lethal weaponry, or decisions where lives are on the line. “Militaries are working hard to adopt artificial intelligence. They’re largely focused on near term issues, and I do worry there is some degree of wishful thinking about our ability to control AI systems,” Scharre says. “It’s very possible that we end up in a place where countries are building and deploying quite dangerous AI weapons, and I think that’s something we need to think about and guard against.” Paul Scharre, Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023). There are two really important things that the United States should be focusing on that are an asymmetric advantage that we have over China in AI competition. Yeah, I think that we are starting to see the early components of a competitive strategy in artificial intelligence, but we have a long way to go still. So I'm very excited by Congress's energy behind the 280 billion dollars in the CHIPS and Science Act. Of that, the 52 billion for semiconductor industry here in the United States. I think the Biden administration's move on restricting the tooling to China for semiconductor production was a good one, although I have some concerns about the chip restrictions themselves. But I think that one of the challenges we're going to face is that we can't do everything, we need to be strategic about our approach.

I especially like how this book focused on geopolitical tensions, military strategy & use, and international relations - for example foreign policy. Amidst this turbulence, alumnus Paul Scharre’s new book, Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, is hitting the bookshelves at an opportune moment. In Four Battlegrounds, Scharre lays out a comprehensive analysis of AI’s capacities and what is at stake in the race among nations for AI supremacy. Amidst the ominous din, Scharre’s sober survey will leave readers with a balanced and nuanced understanding of the forces that will shape AI, and how it could alter the geopolitical landscape in the coming decades. One of the challenges is the problem that we’re seeing with chatbots like Microsoft’s Bing and AI systems everywhere. AI systems break. They fail. They do surprising things, particularly in novel situations. Making AI systems safe is in many ways harder than making them capable. That’s a problem for large tech companies, and it’s a problem for the military as well. One is talent. The U.S. is the destination of choice for AI scientists from around the world, including from China, and China can’t compete with that. The best AI scientists in the world want to come to the United States, they don’t want to go to China. In fact, China’s top AI students are coming to the U.S. for their graduate studies. That’s a tremendous advantage that the U.S. has in the global competition for talent, and we want to double down on that. We should be making it easier for people with advanced STEM degrees to stay in the United States.

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China has things we simply don’t allow here, like facial recognition software everywhere. Do lax policies like that give Beijing a leg up? To be clear, Scharre says the current tensions between the US and China do not at all qualify as an arms race, at least as the relevant experts define "arms race". Notable references and a well-executed narrative contribute to the book's overall appeal. Brother's perspective on international relations, particularly the nuanced approa The U.S. has tremendous strength in an AI competition with China, and I firmly believe that the United States can remain the global leader in artificial intelligence. That’s if we harness those strengths and work with U.S. allies; if we’re doubling down on advantages in talent, drawing on some of the best and brightest from around the world, bringing them to the States keeping them here; and if we invest in the next generation of research into semiconductor technology to ensure that U.S. companies stay dominant in key points of the semiconductor supply chain.

Reminder: The Phrase "No Evidence" Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication.) But he keeps those biases separate enough from his military analysis that I don't find those biases to be a reason for not reading the book. The title's battlegrounds refer to data, compute, talent, and institutions. Those seem like important resources that will influence military outcomes. But it seems odd to label them as battlegrounds. Wouldn't resources be a better description? This is an excellent book, and if not for a lot of business travel, I would have finished this library book in two weeks or less. It explores the four areas that today's AI needs to thrive - data sets, computing power, talent, and institutions. While taking the global view, it mostly compares the progress of the US versus China. I guess Scharre's answer is: a few decades from now. He suggests that in the long term, AI might have dramatic effects such as reliably predicting which side will win a war, which presumably would cause the losing side to concede. He analogizes AI to "a Cambrian explosion of intelligence". But for the foreseeable future, he focuses exclusively on AI as a tool for waging war. A new industrial revolution has begun. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives—and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, and Europe. Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre takes readers inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future.It’s very possible that we end up in a place where countries are building and deploying quite dangerous AI weapons, and I think that’s something we need to think about and guard against.” Paul Scharre