The US and China Are Gearing Up for an AI Cold War

It’s only natural that a book co-authored by one of the men most instrumental in crafting the last Cold War would feature large segments outlining a new one. Old habits truly die hard.

Rather than going toe to toe with the Soviet Union over nuclear weapons, Kissinger sees the current millennia marked by a struggle between the U.S. and China over AI supremacy. Cue the spooky music.

Though the characters and tools have changed, the actual outline of predicted events feels awfully similar to the middle 20th century. Kissinger (I’m assuming it’s his voice speaking through these particular pages) specifically invokes the realist foreign policy concept of a balance of power among nations on the international stage. Kissinger describes a situation where the U.S. and China are in hot competition over all things AI, a competition that includes both algorithms made to get your self-driving car speeding over to Wendy’s faster and able to autonomously operate a drone swarm capable of assassinating some undesirable in a country you’re not supposed to know about.

Human rights groups and activists of varied stripes, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, have spoken out against that latter option, arguing the introduction and wide deployment of AI weapons systems would lead to a more violent war itching for war. The Age of AI authors completely disagree.

“If the United States and its allies recoil before the implications of these capabilities and halt progress on them, the result would not be a more peaceful world,” they write. “Instead, it would be a less balanced world in which the development and use of the most formidable strategic capabilities takes place with less regard for the concepts of democratic accountability.”

On this point, the writers and the U.S. government are aligned. Just last month the U.S. rejected United Nations calls for a binding agreement regulating or banning the use of “killer robot” autonomous weapons systems.