In February, the analytical resource "MarketForecast" (MarketForecast.com) published the announcement of its research on the global market for artificial intelligence and robotics in the defense sector. The company predicts that the global market will reach $ 61 billion by 2027. In 2018, it is valued at $ 39.2 billion. For nine years, countries will spend 487 billion dollars on the development of these technologies in the defense industry.
Market growth will be driven by large investments from the United States, China, Russia and Israel in next-generation technologies, as well as large-scale purchases from India, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Japan. Most of the market will be in military robots, followed in descending order by computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition and social media analysis.
China, in turn, said last year that the country will reach parity with the United States in the development of artificial intelligence by 2020, make breakthroughs in 2025 and take the palm in this area in 2030. By 2020, China would like to bring the value of the artificial intelligence market to $ 22.7 billion, and the value of related industries to $ 150 billion. In 2030, the corresponding figures should rise to $ 150 billion and $ 1.5 trillion.
American experts note that Beijing has great ambitions, of course, but the race for military artificial intelligence is still gaining momentum, so it is difficult to predict anything.
So far, the Americans are ahead of everyone, but, nevertheless, the United States takes statements of this kind seriously and many believe that China is catching up with the United States. In 2017, the Chinese filed for 641 artificial intelligence patents, and the United States - 130. In 2012, American scientists submitted 41% of articles for the prestigious Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the Chinese - in total ten%. In 2017, the picture looked different: Americans had 34%, Chinese already 23%.
One of the reasons why China is booming in the field of artificial intelligence is the abundance of data. In everyday life, Chinese people pay online more often than any other country, order more goods at home, actively use bicycle sharing services, and so on. The state is deploying the largest systems for face recognition and identification of citizens, a project to automate the work of an entire province by 2020 and the creation of "smart cities". All of this produces a huge amount of information on which to train artificial intelligence. In 2017, Chinese artificial intelligence startups received 48% of all global venture capital investments in this area, and American ones - 38%.
Kai-Fu Lee, a former senior executive at Microsoft and Google and now head of investment firm Sinovation Ventures, says he's just a good scientist with tons of information will always win over a brilliant scientist with less data at hand.
However, the race in artificial intelligence today is not like the race to build nuclear weapons. Experts note that despite the competition and thickening of colors in the media, Americans and Chinese often work together, in the same companies, and research centers of IT giants from these countries can be located both in China and in the United States. So Google opens an artificial intelligence research laboratory in China, and the Chinese Baidu and Tencent have their laboratories in the United States. The connection between Silicon Valley and Shanghai, for example, is closer than it seems at first glance.
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The main obstacle to development for China in this area is the lack of specialists. Only about 40% of Chinese AI specialists have more than 10 years of relevant work experience, while in the United States this figure exceeds 70%. For this reason, one of Beijing's goals is to attract foreign specialists in robotics and artificial intelligence to the country. They are attracted both with the help of generous grants, freedom in research, and a significant simplification of all bureaucratic and migration procedures.
While the main work is carried out in scientific laboratories and commercial companies, the military applications of artificial intelligence today cannot be ignored. One of the most obvious uses for artificial intelligence is to control drone swarms. With the chosen algorithm, the swarms of drones from hundreds or thousands of units can neutralize or paralyze the work of more complex and familiar participants in the battlefield, such as tanks or airplanes. Submarine and surface drones will be able to interfere with the functioning of submarines and ships. According to the Americans, the Chinese generals are closely following the success of AlphaGo in the game of Go and the speed of the program's learning. Someday the confrontation between machines under the control of artificial intelligence in battle will occur faster than a person will realize.
Late last year, the Center for a New American Security hosted a summit on artificial intelligence and global security. Eric Schmidt, now the former chairman of the board of directors of Google parent company Alphabet, also spoke at the summit. “Trust me, the Chinese are very good at AI. And they will use this technology for both commercial and military purposes with all the possible consequences,”said Schmidt. Schmidt also expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that the Pentagon pays little attention to the implementation of algorithms in the field of big data (primarily referring to the analysis of information while observing drone operators for targets).pays little for talented AI specialists and underestimates the level of Chinese education. According to Schmidt, this biased underestimation of China's ability to produce talent in artificial intelligence and programming could be costly for the United States.
Beijing's focus on artificial intelligence has not escaped the attention of its neighbors in the region. It was revealed last month that India and Japan are planning to join forces to develop military ground-based unmanned vehicles and military robots to counterbalance China. A representative of the Indian Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) said that the goal of the collaboration is to equip the armed forces with self-sufficient, adaptable and resilient robotic systems.
According to another resource, Marketsandmarkets.com, the military robotics market alone was estimated at $ 16.7 billion in 2017, and will reach $ 30.8 billion by 2022. According to this company, the fastest growing demand for ground military robots, as India, China and developing countries attend to the creation of ground robotic armies. Europe and the countries of the Asia-Pacific region will be the leading regions in this regard in four years, since in Europe they will begin to bring to the market those that are still in the pilot stage of development, and the countries of Asia will be ready to invest a lot of money in the purchase of combat robots.
Ilya Plekhanov
