Who Is Winning the AI Race: China, the EU or the United States?

The Founder Of Artificial Intelligence Sounds The Alarm: 4 Major Risks You Need To Know

Automation data analytic with 3d rendering ai robot with digital visualization for big data ... [+] scientist

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Known as the Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton is now worried about the technology he helped create. After working with Google GOOG for 10 years on the Google Brain project, he resigned so he could warn others about the dangers of AI. With a BA in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge (1970) and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1978), the 75-year-old has decided to blow the whistle on the technology, raising concerns over its use. His concerns are shared by the Center for AI Safety, an organization dedicated to reducing the societal-scale risks from artificial intelligence. Here are some of those concerns.

Danger #1: Military Applications

Concept of future war and disasters. A robot with two legs and gun turrets walks the street of a ... [+] city which has been destroyed. Either by war or natural disaster.

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As AI advances, it will become increasingly intelligent, likely surpassing that of the human brain. As a military application, there are several concerns. While AI will allow for smarter decisions and fewer casualties in war, in the wrong hands, it will create a very uneven playing field between adversaries. Thus, the nation with the most advanced AI will dominate.

Danger #2: Misinformation and Disinformation

We all experienced deception during the pandemic on social media. However, the art of misinformation and disinformation will flourish with AI. It will become increasingly difficult to know what is true and what is false. Hence, nations with the most advanced AI could use the technology to mislead their citizens or the citizens of an adversarial country. Politicians could also use this technology to win elections. One nation could use AI to influence an election in another. The result of this is an increasing level of distrust, which would promote greater civil unrest. AI in the wrong hands could help bring a nation to the brink of collapse.

AI deception in the future could become widespread as companies and politicians use it to reach their goals. As AI becomes more advanced, and if achieving the goal becomes more important than truth, AI could undermine human control. In one example, according to the Center for AI Safety, Volkswagen programmed their engines to reduce emissions only when being monitored. The company plead guilty and agreed to pay a multi-billion-dollar settlement in early 2017.

Danger #3: Jobs Lost

Giant robot throwing man in a trash can. Artifical intelligence replacing jobs concept. Vector ... [+] illustration.

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Over the years, there have been numerous technologies that have materially changed an industry. Two examples include the horse and buggy industry and auto manufacturing. In the case of the former, technology helped create automobiles, which replaced the horse drawn carriage as the primary mode of transportation, leaving many workers unemployed. During the 1970s, technology displaced many factory workers as automation swept the industry. I could easily envision a day when a factory of 5,000 workers is replaced with 50, some operating the control room while others maintain the machinery. To maximize profits companies will likely cut their workforce. Moreover, companies with the most advanced AI could dominate their industry.

Danger #4: The Dictator

TOPSHOT - Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen on a screen set at Red Square as he addresses a ... [+] rally and a concert marking the annexation of four regions of Ukraine Russian troops occupy - Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, in central Moscow on September 30, 2022. (Photo by Alexander NEMENOV / AFP) (Photo by ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)

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There are many today who seek power and influence over everything else. On Friday, September 1, 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking about AI, said, "Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world." Shortly thereafter, Elon Musk tweeted, "competition for AI superiority at national level (is the) most likely cause of WW3."

As AI advances, it is unlikely all world leaders will agree to play nice. Thus, a technology with many wonderful benefits could become our undoing. And it will if we are unable to install adequate safeguards to protect humanity.

How Will Artificial Intelligence Change Higher Ed?

AI is part of a larger phenomenon that has shaped knowledge production around the world — an enormous democratization of what is known as well as what is knowable. Indeed, almost all of the macro-trends shaping higher education come down to the increasing availability of information. At times, it seems, people want to credit the internet for this revolution. However, it's not Wikipedia that has made the biggest change to the availability of information, or what counts as knowledge.

Look at our own institutions.

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Since the '60s, colleges have been home to new fields of discovery that have not only expanded the landscape of knowledge, but have helped expand the collective sense of what it means to be human.

Women's, gender, Africana, Asian American, Chicano/a and Latino/a studies are a few examples. We also have fields that have stretched the limit of how we know (computer science, neuroscience, or cognitive science), what we know (materials science or string theory), and how we use it (environmental engineering, data science, and nanotechnology), just to name a few.

It is commonplace to lament that colleges are great at adding new things but not so great at ending them. But that isn't something to lament. We are here to add to knowledge, not erase it or pretend it never happened.

This means that the frontiers of knowledge aren't here to be shunned by higher education. They are here to be pressed. If AI is an outgrowth of the human drive to know, which it is, it can emerge as a positive contributor not just to what humans know, but how.

My conviction here emerges in part from my own research in the neuroscience of aesthetics, which has led me to believe that the probabilistic nature of human learning — the very principle that undergirds modern AI — is intricately connected to something that seems to hit at the core of who we are as humans: our ability to experience beauty.

Simply put, beauty emerges with certain kinds of learning because we can experience pleasure when the predictions we make about the world are verified — when we predict what happens next, or what goes together, and we are right. We also experience pleasure when we learn something new, especially when what we learn provides insight into something that had previously been ambiguous, uncertain, or confusing. More than this, aesthetic pleasure can enhance learning by orienting us toward objects and experiences that may afford the biggest learning gains.

Nothing ChatGPT does will take away the pleasures of learning. More profoundly, it seems clear that the active part of learning is immensely important. Learning requires more than synthesis of information, for it is in the testing of knowledge that we make the biggest gains in understanding. This means that it is how we put our knowledge to work that matters. It also means that learning is a social undertaking, in which we discuss, dispute, verify, reject, modify, and extend what we (think we) know to other people and the world around us. These are fundamentally human endeavors.

What differentiates humans from AI, in part, comes down to that: The pleasures of learning lead us toward creative possibilities, as well as toward active experimentation. For now, humans do that, and they do it pretty well. And I would advise that humans limit AI action — the ability to directly influence the world around us by altering or manipulating it – because it is in action that what humans value most really lies. It is in not just what we do, but in the effects of what we do in the world. It is in ethics that humanity finds itself and determines its own meaning.

The hope for humanity remains where it always was: with us and us alone.

G. Gabrielle Starr is president of Pomona College.

Cooperation Key To Speed Up Tech Breakthroughs

Visitors look at intelligent machinery at the China International Big Data Industry Expo 2023 in Guiyang, capital of southwest China's Guizhou province, May 26, 2023. The China International Big Data Industry Expo 2023 kicked off on Friday in Guiyang, showcasing the country's latest achievements in the big data industry and promoting relevant business exchanges. [Photo/Xinhua]

Experts, officials point to risks posed to world economy by potential decoupling

Greater international cooperation is needed to explore technological frontiers such as computer-brain interface technologies and artificial intelligence, which are widely seen as key future drivers of global economic growth, officials and experts said.

Highlighting that decoupling in crucial technologies will only slow down the world economy, they called on Chinese companies to have a problem-solving mindset and to accelerate the drive for breakthroughs in core sectors.

The comments came as AI is grabbing global headlines.

US company Nvidia became the world's first chipmaker with a market capitalization of over $1 trillion on Tuesday morning amid surging demand for its AI chips. Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk's brain-implant company Neuralink said last week that it had been given the green light for its first in-human clinical trial.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said on Thursday that China firmly opposes any actions by the United States to politicize and weaponize economic, trade and technological issues.

These comments were in response to recent media reports quoting US Treasury official Paul Rosen as saying that new rules were under consideration which would restrict the flow of US investment and know-how to Chinese companies engaged in the fields of advanced semiconductors, AI and quantum computing.

But China is clear that partnership and cooperation is the only way forward if the world is to fully harness the potential offered by the technological revolution, according to experts.

This was expressed clearly by President Xi Jinping in his congratulatory message to the 2023 Zhongguancun Forum, which ended in Beijing earlier this week. Xi said in the message that China is willing to work with countries around the world to promote technological innovation to better benefit the people of all countries.

Wu Hequan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said international cooperation is vital to achieving scientific breakthroughs, and China and the US are highly complementary to each other in AI.

US companies are advanced in fundamental science and underlying computer algorithms, while China has a big market and rich application scenarios, and its research and development prowess in AI is also growing, Wu said.

By 2022, China had secured the top position globally in terms of the number of patent applications for AI, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

AI technology will usher in the next digital revolution after the internet and smartphones, experts said, with Goldman Sachs forecasting that generative AI could drive a 7 percent increase in global GDP, or almost $7 trillion, over a 10-year period.

Nick Fowler, chief academic officer at Elsevier, a Netherlands-based academic publishing company, said there is enduring strength in the China-US research relationship, despite noise about the two countries decoupling.

The Field Weighted Citation Impact — a proxy measure of research quality — of China-US co-authored publications reached almost two, which is twice the world average, and higher than the performance of either China or the US alone, according to a report by Elsevier.

While Washington is imposing increasingly tighter restrictions on technology, China's central leadership is attaching greater importance to innovation-driven development.

Beijing and Shenzhen, a metropolis in Guangdong province, announced favorable policies this week to support the development of domestically developed AI chips, which are the key to the ongoing AI boom triggered by ChatGPT, an AI chatbot developed by the US company OpenAI.

Liu Qingfeng, chairman of Chinese AI company iFlytek Co, said, "Chinese companies must devote big, real money to research and development in fundamental science to achieve breakthroughs in AI."

So far, China has developed at least 79 AI large-language models, or rivals of ChatGPT, according to the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China.

When it comes to computer-brain interface technology, which enables a person to control an external device using brain signals, China is also making steady progress.

A team led by Duan Feng, a professor at Nankai University in Tianjin, completed the world's first interventional brain-computer interface experiment in a nonhuman primate earlier this month.

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