America Can Stop China from Dominating Artificial Intelligence--And Should
by Gordon G. Chang • August 17, 2019 at 5:00 am
The People's Republic of China, nonetheless, is already an AI powerhouse, and for America to maintain its edge—and to prevent U.S. tech from being used for exceedingly disturbing purposes —Washington should force U.S. companies to end cooperative AI projects in China.
The West should be seriously concerned: whoever wins at AI will both dominate the global economy and field the most destructive conventional military force.
Unfortunately, American companies are helping China's leaders in what many call—correctly—crimes against humanity. For instance, AI researchers from Microsoft, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Michigan State University gave keynote speeches at the Chinese Conference on Biometric Recognition in Xinjiang in August of last year on facial recognition, a social-control technology.
Some of Google's research is in China. The company has three AI operations there: the Google AI China Center in Beijing, established in 2017, and partnerships with China's two premier educational institutions, Peking University and Tsinghua University....If the labs remain open, the net flow of AI learning will be out of the U.S. into China.
Moreover, Chinese researchers, if they could not work for American companies in China, would not, as Vox suggests, necessarily find employment in their homeland. Some of those seeking research slots would follow other Chinese to the United States, and that would exacerbate one of Beijing's big AI vulnerabilities. "China's Path to AI Domination Has a Problem: Brain Drain," is the title of an August 7 article posted by the MIT Technology Review. The U.S. can make that crucial problem even more severe.
China, writes Amy Webb in Inc., has been "building a global artificial intelligence empire, and seeding the tech ecosystem of the future." It has been particularly successful, Webb, the founder of the Future Today Institute, believes. "China is poised to become its undisputed global leader, and that will affect every business," she notes.
Not everyone shares Webb's assessment that Chinese researchers are in the lead. America, after all, is home to most leading AI tech. The People's Republic of China, nonetheless, is already an AI powerhouse, and for America to maintain its edge—and to prevent U.S. tech from being used for exceedingly disturbing purposes, Washington should force U.S. companies to end cooperative AI projects in China.
Artificial intelligence permits machines to mimic human functions such as driving vehicles, recognizing spoken words, and playing games of skill like chess and Go.
