Wright N Artificial Intelligence Creative Perspectives 2019

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Given the wide-ranging implications for global competition, domestic political systems and daily life, US policymakers must prepare for the impacts of new artificial intelligence (AI)-related technologies. Anticipating AI’s impacts on the global order requires US policy makers’ awareness of certain key aspects of the AI-related technologies—and how those technologies will interact with the rapidly changing global system of human societies. One area that has received little in-depth examination to date is how AI-related technologies could affect countries’ domestic political systems—whether authoritarian, liberal democratic, or a hybrid of the two—and how they might impact global competition between different regimes.
This work highlights several key areas where AI-related technologies have clear implications for globally integrated strategic planning and requirements development:
Since 2012, new AI-related technologies have entered the real world with rapidly accelerating scale and speed. While the character of these technologies currently favors enhanced surveillance, it is limited by a need for extensive human involvement and the preparation of big-data platforms. This will likely dominate current efforts to incorporate AI into social governance, as we see now in China.
AI may help enable a plausible competitor to liberal democracy allowing large and industrially sophisticated states to make their citizens rich while maintaining rigid control. China is now building core components of such a system of digital authoritarianism. Such systems are already being emulated in a global competition with liberal democracy.
Russia has a different political regime than China. The Russian model is a hybrid that relies on a mix of less overt and often nontechnical mechanisms to manipulate online information flows. Competition for influence between digital liberal democracy and more authoritarian digital regimes will occur at many levels: international institutions (and norms), nation states, and corporations. The United States must adopt a multifaceted approach to influence with allies and crucial swing states. It must also carefully prevent unwanted escalation of this competition—as a number of contributors argue in this work, insecurity drives much of Chinese and Russian decision making