Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Product Information

I'm about 95% sure that it will fail to instill an appropriate sense of urgency about understanding AI. I was surprised at the avoidance of science fiction examples, especially when the book considers problems of AI taking over human decision making. He outlined a scary Orwellian piece about how you can't even send WeChat payments that use the dates of the Tiananmen Massacre in them. I’m glad I read this but it was much more policy heavy than I anticipated (especially US policy regarding China, but also DoD acquisition policy and international policy to establish AI norms and guard rails) — important stuff but not what I was most interested in and those areas felt pretty repetitive at times. You have to have big data to crunch, and he covers who has access and how that is collected and analyzed.

This will increasingly be the norm and is problematic when it comes to the weaponization of such tools. S.-China relationship, its deterioration, and AI’s role as a focal point for both Washington and Beijing in achieving national superiority.Four Battlegrounds argues that four key elements define this struggle: data, computing power, talent, and institutions. My intuition says it will change war in some important way, but the book left me without any vision of that impact. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. Scharre ignores this scenario, probably because he sees much slower change in AI capabilities than I see. Its developers borrowed from some fundamental features of GPT-3 and machine learning generally (insofar as the quality of its training data — an underappreciated but established aspect of the field — was a priority), while also making modifications that improve its performance and lower computational burdens.

To be clear, Scharre says the current tensions between the US and China do not at all qualify as an arms race, at least as the relevant experts define "arms race".Scharre’s work serves as an excellent invitation for both regional and interdisciplinary conversations on the role of AI in the future of power and warfare, with immediate implications for MENA states actively working to digitally transform. Scharre is sensitive to overinflating any one aspect of AI — where one AI success is described, its mirrored failure is also discussed. An intriguing study of how artificial intelligence is the new frontier for the rivalry between the U. It is difficult to know whether to feel confident or disturbed by all this information, but Scharre effectively shows where military AI currently stands and where it is going.

Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre takes readers inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future. His work, influenced by mentor Jack Ring, emphasizes the limitations of human speed in operating at machine paces, and how cognitive tech is instrumental in achieving the necessary coordination. AI is already having profound effects on world rivals—the US, China and Russia—and its game-changing technology advancements will exacerbate these conditions.

In this way, some MENA states can already act to leverage AI’s four components to their national advantage. This book will likely help the military keep from falling too far behind in its understanding of AI. The institutions work was especially interesting, as our bureaucracy can get in the way of progress. The author has extensive credibility which is wisely established before the main assertions of the work and frames his perspective on the challenge of AI very well. 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.