Races have winners and losers — at least so I have always thought. At some point, the competition ends and a winner is identified, whether it is first-past-the-post as in a horse race, or first in the marketplace as in a commercial race. Think about VHS and Betamax.
Similarly, we knew who won the space race and many other international races. However, the race we are engaged in with China over artificial intelligence isn’t defined — there are no winning posts, and we don’t even know what winning will look like.
Will we wake up one day and be told we have cleared the winning post and China is in the dust, or the other way round?
We don’t even seem to be engaged in the same race as China. Is it the one President Trump talks about where we are going to out-invest, out-talent, out-research and dominate AI?
Or is it the one China appears to be running, emphasizing using AI as it is now, with the construction of many thousands of deployable robots?
Is it a purely commercial race or a purely military one for both countries?
So far, it seems, we have taken the high road, with proprietary systems, and China has taken the low road with widely deployed, open-source, ready-now systems.
China is aggressively spreading AI across its commercial operations and developing families of robots. The United States is still nibbling at universal deployment. China is mass-producing droves of humanoids that dance, leap in the air, and perform complex duties like cooking.
They entertain and threaten. They are a new workforce, presenting a new level of competition.
Although the United States has reached new heights in invention and pushed the frontiers of AI discovery, it lags in deployment. It has been slower in harvesting the technology.
Now comes the unsettling — actually terrifying — warning from AI researchers that the human race may face extinction as soon as the end of this decade. Three AI bosses — Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of Grok — have called for a slowdown and regulatory oversight.
This warning deserves to be treated as truth until proven otherwise.
Could, as the doomsters fear, no bells ring, no shouts of joy echo from the bleachers at the race’s end because AI has killed us all short of the winning post.
It is a strange race run not by the government but by corporations, with the government cheering from the sidelines. Bill Gates has said the thing about AI is that — unlike other dangerous technologies, such as nuclear — the government has no depth of knowledge, no deep bench. Where AI is concerned, the government is an outsider.
When my television crew and I covered the Upscale conference in Malaga, Spain, last year, we got insight into people from around the world surging ahead in the creative uses of AI, without regard to whether they were using Chinese or American AI. For this cohort, these were just off-the-shelf tools.
This was a new generation of creatives using AI with relish to create fine art, advertisements and designs for everything from a new shape for a car or a wild-patterned shoe to a more comfy living room couch.
I had to wonder whether they weren’t the real winners in the AI race: Those who use it without scaling the heights of its technical possibilities or using it to displace truck drivers.
Only two countries are in that race, the United States and China, but all have a stake. In AI deployment, the United States is far from dominant. Indeed, it is down the list of countries where AI is already incorporated into daily commercial operations. Estonia and the UAE stand out.
The United States is challenging the future before exploiting the present.
It is easy to declare the need for regulation and guardrails, but hard to do that when the subject is in constant transmutation, changing daily and likely to change again tomorrow.
I would propose that the Trump administration appoint a small, nimble, non-industry expert panel to answer just three questions: Is AI an existential threat to the human species? What should be done about that? And how much time do we have?
The threat has been debated academically since 1958 — the heftiest warning came from British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in December 2014.
Warnings from within should be heeded. J. Robert Oppenheimer warned about nuclear weapons. His words still govern nuclear non-proliferation policy and security settings.
The creators of an even more dangerous technology are warning, much as Oppenheimer did.
