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China will lead the world in artificial intelligence if the U.S. fails to spend billions of dollars more on research.
Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt sounded the alarm bells last week, describing China’s potential leadership in A.I. as a security threat that could lead to “high-tech authoritarianism” worldwide.
“If we don’t act now, in 10 or 20 years we’ll say, ‘How could we have missed this?’” Schmidt said during an online event hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) think tank.
Schmidt, now the chair of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Board, says that increasing government funding in A.I. research is crucial because it “can’t be made up by private philanthropy.” The amount of money needed to fund A.I. research projects—those that may not have an immediate impact—is so great that no company (not even Schmidt’s former employer) can provide a substitute.
Martijn Rasser, senior fellow for public policy at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), an influential think tank, shares Schmidt’s view. He said that his group is urging the U.S. to spend $25 billion annually on A.I. research by 2025. For comparison, the White House said in February that it would increase non-military A.I. research spending to $2 billion annually by 2022.
“A.I. is going to be such a fundamentally enabling technology that we cannot afford to shortchange ourselves,” Rasser said.
Politicians and Schmidt, who has invested in A.I. startups and has a huge holding in Google-parent Alphabet, appear to be stoking fears about China’s dominance as one way to create a sense of urgency about increasing national A.I. funding.
Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX)—who, along with Rep. Robin Kelly (D-IL), CNAS, and the BPC, has been working on research intended to help Congress create an A.I. national strategy—cited China as the biggest threat facing the U.S. several times during the talk.
“They don’t care about civil liberties,” Hurd said about China’s hunger for online data to train its A.I. systems at the expense of people’s personal privacy. Some politicians are concerned that China’s views about A.I. and privacy will spread around the globe if the country becomes the world’s leader in A.I.
U.S. tech giants like Facebook and Google, whose executives lawmakers recently grilled about alleged anti-trust violations and weak consumer data protections, were barely mentioned during the event. These tech giants lead other U.S. companies in A.I., putting lawmakers in a predicament over whether they should break them up or impose significant fines that could limit their progress in A.I., potentially strengthening China and its own tech giants.
Hurd had one telling comment that gives a flavor of what some lawmakers are thinking regarding action against the tech giants as it relates to A.I.
“I don’t believe that breaking up some of the great American companies is the way we’re going to out-compete China,” he said.
Schmidt echoed Hurd’s comments, saying that the government needs to be sure that “American companies be the ones that dominate us globally.”
Jonathan Vanian
@JonathanVanian
jonathan.vanian@fortune.com
