Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Paul Scharre exposes the AI arms race between superpowers through four key battlegrounds: data, chips, talent, and institutions
"As Americans and Chinese militarize ever more powerful AI to avoid ceding control to each other, they risk ceding too much power to machines".
Editorial Summary
Paul Scharre is the vice president and director of studies at the Center for a New American Security and a former Pentagon policy analyst and Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Four Battlegrounds argues that four key elements define the struggle for artificial intelligence dominance: data, computing power, talent, and institutions. Scharre explores how artificial intelligence systems are discovering new strategies via war-game simulations, developing combat tactics better than any human, and tracking billions of people using biometrics, while visiting China's "National Team" of leading artificial intelligence companies and interviewing Pentagon leadership to reveal tensions between the military and tech giants. He concludes that democratic tensions create resilience and resistance to autocracy in the face of overwhelmingly powerful technology.
Perspective
"Reading this feels like receiving a classified briefing from someone who has walked the halls of both the Pentagon and China's artificial intelligence companies, understanding viscerally how the competition for artificial intelligence supremacy will reshape global power. The book's distinctive contribution is its framework of four battlegrounds—data procurement, computer chip manufacturing, talent attraction, and institutional frameworks—as the principal arenas where international rivalries over artificial intelligence are playing out. Defense analysts and policy makers will find an essential roadmap for understanding how democratic institutions can maintain technological advantage against authoritarian competitors in the age of artificial intelligence."
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