While Russian, Chinese and Iranian drones are easy to destroy using existing Western systems, the costs are prohibitive. This unsustainable ratio is the result of decades of complacency and bureaucratic inefficiency.
Worse, this situation is merely a prelude to a future of unmanned autonomous weapons. Most current drones are either controlled remotely by a human or simplistically guided by the Global Positioning System or digital maps. But new artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will soon transform warfare, and possibly terrorism, too. One example among many is a 2022 paper published in Science Robotics by Chinese academic researchers showing drone navigation through a forest.
Commercial and military humanoid robots are next. Videos published by researchers at Stanford University show AI-driven robots performing household tasks including pan-frying seafood and cleaning up spilled wine. While cooking shrimp is far from operating a sniper rifle or assembling missile components, there is wide agreement that the “ChatGPT moment” in humanoid robotics has arrived.
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Korean researchers unveil world’s first humanoid robot pilot
Korean researchers unveil world’s first humanoid robot pilot
AI-driven products, both military and commercial, depend on a complex, layered technology stack, at the base of which is semiconductor capital equipment (the high-precision machines that make the chips), followed by semiconductors (such as Nvidia’s AI processors), data centres, AI models and their training data, AI cloud services, hardware product design, manufacturing and systems engineering.
The US, western Europe, Taiwan and South Korea collectively are still ahead of mainland China and Russia in most of these areas, but their lead is narrowing. China already dominates world markets for mass-produced dual-use hardware such as drones and robots.
The Western response to this challenge has thus far been woefully inadequate. Export controls on AI-enabling technologies are limited to semiconductor capital equipment and processors, and even these have been resisted, loosened and evaded. While exports of high-end AI processors to China have been banned, access to US cloud services using those same processors remains open, and Nvidia now provides China with AI processors nearly as powerful, but specially tailored to comply with US export controls. There are no export or licensing controls whatsoever on AI research, models or training data.
Although some US companies, such as Google, have kept their AI models proprietary and restricted Chinese access to their technology, others have done the opposite. While OpenAI prohibits direct Chinese access to its application programming interfaces (API), those same APIs remain available through Microsoft.
Meanwhile, Meta has embraced a fully open-source strategy for its AI efforts and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is lobbying to prevent restrictions on open-source AI models.
The US and European technology sectors are thus behaving like a circular firing squad, with individual firms attempting to sell as much to China as possible. By trying to gain a lead on its immediate competitors, each firm weakens the long-run position of all the others, and ultimately even its own. If this continues, the foreseeable result is that the US and western Europe will fall behind China – and even behind Russia, Iran or decentralised terrorist groups – both in AI-driven warfare and in commercial AI applications.
Deputy defence secretary Kathleen Hicks talks about AI at the Pentagon on November 2, 2023. Photo: AP
Many technologists and managers in Silicon Valley and government organisations are aware of this risk, and are very disturbed by it. But despite some significant initiatives (such as the Defence Innovation Unit within the Pentagon), there has been relatively little change in defence-industry behaviour or government policy.
This situation is particularly absurd, given the obvious opportunity for a hugely advantageous grand bargain: industry acquiescence to government-enforced export controls in return for government-supported collective bargaining with China in technology licensing, market access and other commercial benefits. Notwithstanding a few areas of genuine tension, there is a strikingly high degree of alignment between national-security interests and the long-run collective interests of the Western technology sector.
The logical strategy is for the US government and the European Union to serve as bargaining agents on behalf of Western industry when dealing with China. That means acting in concert with industry, while also retaining the power and independence necessary to establish and enforce stringent controls, which the industry should recognise are in its own long-term interest.
Unfortunately, this is not where things are currently headed. Although policymakers and technologists are waking up to the threat, the underlying technology is now moving dramatically faster than policy debates and legislative processes – not to mention the product cycles of the Pentagon and legacy defence contractors. AI development is progressing so blindingly fast that even the US start-up system is straining to keep up. That means there is no time to lose.
Charles Ferguson, a technology investor and policy analyst, is director of the Oscar-winning documentary “Inside Job”. Copyright:Project Syndicate
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