Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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AI is already having profound effects on world rivals—the US, China and Russia—and its game-changing technology advancements will exacerbate these conditions.

The book consolidates the diverse elements of AI's impact, touching on themes such as access to computing power, talent retention, and the challenges posed by institutions in the AI era. S. Defense Department offices in Silicon Valley, revealing deep tensions between the military and tech giants who control data, chips, and talent. S.’s and China’s relative access to AI’s four components may give them more — but not totalizing — incentives to largely tolerate the paths they are currently on. Scharre ignores this scenario, probably because he sees much slower change in AI capabilities than I see.He suggests that in the long term, AI might have dramatic effects such as reliably predicting which side will win a war, which presumably would cause the losing side to concede.

Beneath it all, data, compute, talent, and institutions shape the trajectory of AI and its impact on relative national power, and constituent states in these regions are exploring new avenues for exploiting them. He explores the ways AI systems are already discovering new strategies via millions of war-game simulations, developing combat tactics better than any human, tracking billions of people using biometrics, and subtly controlling information with secret algorithms.

My intuition says this is mostly more important than is deploying the AI technology that existed in 2022.