Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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The discussions on China's bold moves in the geopolitical arena and the potential consequences are both timely and illuminating. But this does not mean that MENA states will simply accept the medium- or long-term trajectories set for AI by companies based in the U. The move came after Falcon-40B topped AI company Hugging Face’s Open LLM Leaderboard in June 2023, beating out previously leading open-source models like Meta’s LLaMA, while its smaller counterpart, Falcon-7B, is top in its weight class (note that some state-of-the-art models, like OpenAI’s GPT-4, are closed-source). The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose.

His real world-oriented work attempts to contextualize advancements in machine learning and AI for the purposes of defense and national strategic policy, identifying four key areas of contention moving forward: compute, data, algorithms, and people. An intriguing study of how artificial intelligence is the new frontier for the rivalry between the U. Many of the examples involve generative AI and I think it might be better to define these techniques as advanced predictive analytics.But because AI’s four components are taken to vary in relative importance as AI matures over time, and because states have varying access to these four components, as well as a range of intentional choices for harnessing them, Scharre’s framework is global in scope. The global scope of the book, combined with Scharre’s sensitivity to the shortcomings and dangers of existing AI systems, makes it a valuable contribution to understanding the dynamics that increasingly define the geopolitical landscape. The only drawback I would find in the book is that it sometimes comes off as too antagonistic towards China, which is understandable in certain contexts but leaves the reader wanting more information from an unbiased perspective. China technological decoupling is an unavoidable risk for MENA states, triggering, as Mohammed Soliman observes, “a growing digital divide” between a subregion of Gulf states, North African economies, and the Levant “that exacerbates the challenges of finding a digitally capable workforce.

Conservative politicians have claimed for years - without evidence - that US tech firms have an anti-conservative bias. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers. MENA states are nonetheless, as Soliman says, “pursuing policies designed to build up the region’s digital and tech sovereignty,” echoing the emphasis on agency that runs throughout Four Battlegrounds.

The idea of the US positioning its AI as safer and more reliable than those produced by Russia or China, due to more extensive testing, is intriguing and quite possible. My sense is that Scharre personally believes that the proof of the utility of ever-larger models is already here, “yielding more impressive fundamental breakthroughs than other methods. Conceivably that could mean that large countries could be outcompeted by a small country that bypassed such precautions (Israel?

The horse race analogy aptly captures the competition between nations in the AI domain, underscoring the global significance of this emerging battleground. Brother's perspective on international relations, particularly the nuanced approach to China and technology cooperation, is thought-provoking. I was surprised at the avoidance of science fiction examples, especially when the book considers problems of AI taking over human decision making. But Scharre hedges so much on AI’s future that his stated possibilities for the technology begin to rub uncomfortably against his own thesis: that states have agency in how they deal with AI’s four key components.The reader is reminded at appropriate intervals that machine learning-based systems are fundamentally limited, constrained to the types of data they are trained on and narrowly applicable, are generally brittle, and lack after-the-fact explainability. A weakness of AI systems is that they do not respond well to changes of conditions, but this is gradually being overcome with new-generation machine learning. As AI evolves, the relative value of the significance of these inputs could advantage some actors and disadvantage others, further altering the global balance of AI power. The United States currently has the advantage in semiconductor production, chips that are manufactured in Taiwan.