That is a great statement by the author and scary but true. We cannot let China win. This is not a video game; this is real, and the impacts are unknown, but it would be like something out of a science fiction movie, some of which are scary.
I don’t have the answer, but I know our government needs to stay out of this as much as they can. Our government can screw up anything over time. Just look at all the fraud. I’m not saying the government should stay out, but they need to let intellectuals work on this and only provide policy guidance and set limited boundaries. Could you imagine Maxine Waters guiding this effort? There are many others like her in various capacities in Congress.
This is a difficult situation because every time going forward we can’t only think about us, the USA, because this is global. What we limit, China will take advantage of, and if this tool is as powerful as stated, it could shift the world’s power structure. This might sound crazy, but in the future the battles will be AI against AI, hopefully with human control and no longer humans killing humans on the battlefield.
Wow, I even think I sound crazy, but who thought the Jetsons would come true? All IMO.
“There is a race underway that will help determine who leads the world for the next generation. It isn’t happening on a track. There won’t be a finish line or a medal ceremony. But make no mistake: The United States and China are racing for dominance in artificial intelligence. Beijing would be perfectly happy to watch Washington scare America into slowing itself down. In fact, China isn’t just cheering for American regulation to stifle innovation. It is actively working to exploit Americans’ fears about emerging technology.
I spent a year serving on the bipartisan House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. We talked to researchers, national-security officials, startups, academics, and companies actually building this technology. Our task force consulted more than 100 experts and ultimately produced 85 recommendations for Congress. I came away convinced of two things: AI presents real risks, and losing the AI race presents much bigger ones.
That distinction matters because Washington has a bad habit of confusing caution with action. Something new emerges. Someone predicts catastrophe. Cable news discovers a new thing to fear because, candidly, fear sells. Congress holds a hearing, members demand that “something be done,” and pretty soon, Washington is writing rules for a technology most of the room has never used.
That is not strategy — certainly not an America First strategy. That is panic on U.S. government letterhead. And in the competition with China, panic has consequences. The country that leads in artificial intelligence won’t simply have better chatbots. AI will increasingly shape military planning, intelligence, cyber defense, logistics, medicine, manufacturing, agriculture, energy, finance, and scientific discovery.
We need to stop pretending our only choices are regulating AI into submission or letting Silicon Valley run wild. They aren’t. We can protect Americans and still build. We can punish fraud and bad actors without punishing innovation. We can protect children from predatory uses of AI without making it impossible for the next American startup to compete. In other words, we can establish rules of the road without paving the road directly to Beijing.
China does not need some technological breakthrough that makes American innovation disappear. It benefits every time America makes itself slower, more expensive, and more afraid to experiment. And fear is something Beijing understands very well. Chinese influence operations don’t always need to convince Americans that China is wonderful. Sometimes the more effective strategy is making Americans distrust one another, distrust our institutions, and fear our own future. That is the point of cognitive warfare: You don’t always have to defeat your opponent if you can convince your opponent to defeat himself.
Artificial intelligence makes that battlefield even more complicated. Deepfakes can impersonate public officials. Voice cloning can target seniors. Generative AI can manufacture propaganda at extraordinary scale. Bots can make a fringe idea look like a national movement. False images can travel around the world before the truth has finished putting its shoes on.
Those threats are real. I’ve sat through the briefings. I’ve seen what these systems can do. I don’t dismiss them. But the answer to China’s use of emerging technology cannot be for America to become afraid of emerging technology. Imagine applying that logic to every previous technological revolution. Our adversaries have airplanes, so we stop building airplanes? They have computers, so we regulate computers until nobody wants to build them here? They use the internet for propaganda, so America retreats from the internet? We would recognize the absurdity immediately.
Yet Washington is flirting with exactly that mentality on AI.”