For Russia and Vladimir Putin, it is clear that planetary supremacy and artificial intelligence (AI) are intertwined. “Artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia, but of all mankind,” he said in a video address to Russian schoolchildren on the occasion of the beginning of the school year. "Whoever becomes a leader in this area will rule the world."
Putin is not alone in his opinion. He simply clothed it with a sonorous form to indicate the intensity of the race, in which China, Russia and the United States are already participating to master smart military capabilities. Each country has formally recognized the critical importance of intelligent machines to the future of its national security, and each country sees AI technologies such as autonomous drones and intelligence processing software as tools to complement human capital in the military.
"The United States, Russia and China agree that AI will be the key technology that will determine the power of a nation in the future," Gregory Allen, a research fellow at the Center for New Approaches to American Security, told WIRED magazine. He is one of the authors of a recent report commissioned by the Director of US National Intelligence, which concludes with the following conclusion: “As with transformational military technology, the national security implications of AI will not only be significant, but truly revolutionary. Governments around the world will ponder, and some will respond with emergency policy measures, perhaps no less drastic than those considered in the early decades after nuclear weapons emerged.”
China's State Council published a detailed strategy in July, in which it announced as its goal "by 2030, to make the country a leader and global innovation hub in AI." Among the measures envisaged by the government, named commitments to invest in AI development and related research, which will "improve the country's defense and ensure national security." China now possesses most of the factors it needs to become a global AI power, according to a recent report from Goldman Sachs.
In addition, China has experience in using AI within the country to manage its own population (experience that the United States lacks), based on its fundamentally different type of government. For example, the Chinese authorities are using AI technologies such as facial recognition and predictive analytics to prevent behavior-based crime. This most likely means that Chinese AI systems have more specialized tracking expertise and other training that can be successfully applied in the military.
China's AI strategy also directly links commercial development to defense applications - another feature associated with a strong central government. For example, Baidu, China's leading search engine, oversees the national machine learning laboratory, which aims to improve China's international competitiveness. Beihang University, a leading military drone development center, is also part of China's national machine learning project. By the way, the US Department of Commerce has banned the export of some devices to this university for reasons of national security.
Russia still lags behind China and the US in AI development. However, the modernization of the military, which began in the country in 2008, has spurred a massive expansion of research and new investments in AI. The Russian military-industrial committee has set the goal of making 30 percent of military equipment robotic by 2025. With a smaller tech industry than the United States or China, Russia is forced to set and achieve similar ambitious goals to remain competitive. However, Russia has the advantage of having a powerful academic school in the field of science and technology, and also knows how to effectively apply the technologies that it already has.
Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Research, noted that with relatively cheaper drones with a shorter flight range, Russia was able to effectively use them in Ukraine and Syria. Gregory Allen added that Russia has shown a strong interest in making AI and machine learning work through its already highly impressive propaganda, intelligence, hacking, and social media manipulation campaigns. As in China, in Russia the government is much more centralized and the government has a lot of influence on the development of AI in the country. This suggests that developments will most likely be focused on solving military and intelligence tasks.
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While the US has, at least so far, been the acknowledged global leader in AI development, this development is almost entirely concentrated in the private sector, and the government lags far behind in strategy and R&D. It wasn't until September 2016 that the White House released its first AI report, although the Pentagon has been developing its Third Counterweight strategy for several years now and, in particular, is monitoring the development of machine learning and AI in China.
However, the US government cannot order the private tech sector to cooperate, as the Chinese or Russian governments can do, and the degree of cooperation in America is highly dependent on the political climate. Experts point out that in some important areas, the US is lagging behind China and Russia in the use of AI. In part, this is because the survival of authoritarian regimes in these countries depends on intelligence and the ability to identify and eliminate internal resistance. Plus, they can apply these technologies without looking back at privacy or civil rights concerns. And while the US CIA, whose mission is external, not internal, uses AI to collect data on social networks, the authority of this information collection is a matter of controversy.
The AI race between China, Russia and the United States is different from the previous arms race because the technology has obvious and immediate commercial applications. The same technology that makes Facebook so effective in recognizing faces in photographs can help government agencies track down suspects and spies. Autonomous vehicles require the same technology as combat drones and ground vehicles. Private companies actually conduct military research, whether they like it or not.
One positive thing about Putin’s rather sinister speech was his recognition of the fact that equalizing AI competitors makes the whole world safer. This is the main argument of nuclear deterrence: if both sides of the conflict have nuclear weapons and their mutual destruction is guaranteed, they will not use these weapons. As Allen points out, AI can make a difference so that population size is no longer as important to a nation-state. Smaller countries that achieve the AI advantage "will be able to compete in a much heavier weight class."
And, finally, perhaps our AI, if we teach them morality, will themselves choose international cooperation and resource exchange as the most profitable strategy.
Igor Abramov
