The promise and peril of artificial intelligence (AI), or what President Trump prefers to call “super intelligence” (SI), are being hotly debated throughout this country and throughout the world. AI’s proponents focus on its potential to improve our way of life at home and to enhance our capabilities to protect us from enemies abroad. AI’s detractors, on the other hand, worry that it will destroy our way of life at home and, in the worst-case scenario, replace humans as decision-makers throughout the world. But as with all scientific and technological developments, AI will combine both promise and peril. A little historical humility is in order.
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From the dawn of history, humans have used science and technology in ways that have benefitted and harmed them. Fire produced heat to protect humans from the cold but was also used as a weapon of destruction. Metal and iron were used to make tools that made farming easier and thereby increased the food supply, but they were also used to make deadlier weapons for war. Advances in science and technology improved the speed and comfort of travel, but also enabled humans to inflict harm on each other from greater distances. Advances in rocketry enabled humans to explore space, but also to build intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads. (RELATED: A Conservative Answer to the ‘National Freakout’ Over AI)
The concerns expressed by those who oppose moving forward to exploit AI are real and serious, but so, too, were the concerns expressed by those who, since the dawn of the nuclear age, have wanted to put the nuclear genie back in its bottle because it enables humans to destroy our world. (RELATED: When AI Stops Answering and Starts Acting)
But U.S. policymakers in the United States have to make decisions in specific geopolitical environments. We forged ahead in the nuclear arms race first to acquire atomic weapons before Hitler did, and later to stay ahead of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union in the race for the hydrogen bomb. There was much debate in this country about whether to pursue the hydrogen bomb. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist of the Manhattan Project during World War II, opposed it, while scientist Edward Teller proposed moving forward. Teller was right. We just beat the Soviets to the hydrogen bomb. Who knows what would have happened if Stalin got there first.
As the nuclear era continued, arms controllers sought ways to abolish nuclear weapons, even as more countries became nuclear powers. When the Soviets launched Sputnik, the nuclear arms race became more intense, and strategists, like Henry Kissinger and Edward Luttwak, wrote about fighting limited nuclear wars, and the U.S. developed a strategic triad of nuclear weapons platforms (land-based, sea-based, and bomber-based). Herman Kahn even updated Clausewitz in On Thermonuclear War (1960). Other strategists, like Daniel Graham and Robert Jastrow, promoted defenses against nuclear missiles and warheads.
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The U.S. proceeded with the development of these weapons and delivery systems even though the risk of catastrophic nuclear war thereby increased. The geopolitical environment — the Cold War struggle for the world against the Soviet Union — arguably required it.
AI or SI also needs to be evaluated in the context of our current geopolitical environment. We are in a race with Communist China for AI/SI superiority. If we stop racing, we will lose ground to China. This happened to us in the 1960s, when we unilaterally stopped building nuclear missiles, and the Soviets achieved nuclear parity, then strove for superiority and a first-strike capability.
The United States needs to exploit the benefits — civilian and military — of AI/SI for geoeconomic and geopolitical purposes. Remember what Defense Secretary Harold Brown said in the late 1970s about the nuclear arms race: “When we build, they build. When we stop, they build.” We cannot let that happen again with artificial/super intelligence.
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