The battle over who will set the ground rules and guardrails around Artificial Intelligence, and by extension who will emerge as the dominant world power, is between China and the U.S.
The real strategic question is no longer whether America can slow China’s technological advance at the margin, but whether we can remain the global leaders in building, deploying, and selling AI, National Review reports. That’s why President Trump’s AI Action Plan prioritizes global adoption of American AI.
A group of tech advisors and tech leaders have made this trip with Trump.
Bob Maginnis, a retired U.S. Army officer and author of The New AI Cold War, says Trump would do well to remember President Reagan's adage when dealing with the Russians and nuclear weapons: trust but verify.
“Well, I'd like to see some standards, some guardrails that are verifiable, that we agreed to not steal one another's intellectual property, which I won't believe.”
He says the real question to be asked is 'can anyone control AI?' Advanced systems have been able to break out of supposedly secure testing environments, copied and hidden themselves in databases in an effort at self-preservation. They are alleged to have the ability to hack into any computer program regardless of encryption or other security measures. Maginnis says even the developers aren't sure what their technology is doing.
“A lot of them say that they really don't understand what's going on inside the systems that they've designed. They can explain some of the reactions, but not all of them. We are going into parts unknown, and it's going to be hard to discern how best to regulate, oversee, control this stuff going forward.”
Maginnis says the U.S. is dealing with constraints that China doesn't have to consider.
“It is a tough map ahead. It really is. I don't know that without jeopardizing some civil liberties, which I don't support, we're going to be able to stay abreast or ahead of the Chinese in a meaningful way.”
