Op-Ed: AI Superiority Is a Matter of National Security
By Steve Levy
China’s paid influencers must be quite proud of themselves for having so quickly shifted U.S opinion against the construction of new AI data centers.
The social media influence program has been so successful that it has both Democrat and Republican officials alike running for the hills when it comes to supporting the establishment of these needed AI centers throughout the nation.
Initially, there was great enthusiasm about what AI could do for our nation and the world. It was not only going to be an incredible economic boom, as evidenced by the extraordinary growth of AI stock funds (which have bolstered the retirement funds of the majority of Americans), but the advances themselves would cure diseases, including cancer and Alzheimer’s, and dramatically enhance our quality of life.
Some localities were gushing over the incredible amount of tax revenue that they were receiving from the new AI centers established in their region.
While "60 Minutes" did a rather negative segment on AI recently - claiming that electric rates went up in Loudoun County, Virginia due to the presence of an AI center, they failed to mention that the county’s residents paid $5800 less each year in property taxes because they hosted the center, which accounts for 45% of the county’s revenues.
The left-leaning program also failed to mention that Virginia has implemented regulations preventing electric bill increases to be passed along to the ratepayers.
But then the tide suddenly shifted. People were starting to believe the influencers who were claiming that AI was going to blow up the world, siphon away all local water supplies, and make electric bills go through the roof.
It has now been clearly documented that a major player in pushing this narrative is, in fact, influencers paid for by the Chinese Communist Party.
We are in a race to determine who will dominate this sector. And, make no mistake, the stakes could not be higher. Whichever nation controls AI will wind up controlling the world’s economy and maintain military superiority.
It’s not much different than the stage we were at in the 1940s, when the concept of building an atomic weapon was within the realm of possibility.
The idea of Nazi Germany getting hold of this weapon before America was so frightening to physicist Albert Einstein that he overlooked his pacifistic tendencies and pleaded with President Roosevelt to get on it and beat the Germans to the bomb. This resulted in the Manhattan Project, which indeed helped America win this race. And thank God we did.
Einstein later backtracked on his decision to push for the bomb, but there’s no question that he was correct in doing so in the first place.
Some back then might’ve said that the idea of building a nuclear weapon is so scary that we must forge agreements from every nation not to pursue it. But that would’ve been pure folly. We weren’t going to be able to enter into a moral agreement with Hitler or Japan that we would all hold back. We knew they were gunning for it and they knew we were as well, and that’s just the way it was going to be.
The idea that we could somehow trust China, a criminal nation that lies, cheats and steals on an everyday basis, on an AI slowdown is pure lunacy.
They are hoping that we would be so foolish and naive as to enter into such an agreement and hold back our efforts to win the race, while they would surely continue in a clandestine manner to pursue AI until they attained dominance.
We must be equally leery of submitting to the suggestion of some AI company owners, who have suggested that we allow a conglomerate of democracies to oversee the industry’s decisions.
If the U.S. will never allow ourselves to be submissive to an international criminal court, which would love to control and punish us, there is no way we will ever allow ourselves to be subservient to a Brussels-EU-like entity.
This is not to say that there are not very legitimate arguments being made by localities. But the solution is not very difficult.
We can indeed make sure that those companies that stand to gain tremendously by the establishment of these centers pay back to the community so that the locality is actually enriched with the lowering of their tax and electricity bills.
It’s estimated that we’re about six months ahead of China in this race. The moratoria that are being proposed throughout the nation may be just enough to help China not only catch up, but actually surpass us.
Some have tried to make the claim that a temperature increase of 1° Centigrade over the next century poses an existential threat to America and the world. While climate change is indeed real, such doomsday talk is greatly exaggerated. On the other hand, the idea of China obtaining dominance in the field of AI is indeed an existential threat to America’s survival.
We can put safeguards in place. But what we can’t do is surrender this race to our economic and military adversaries who wish us harm.
And to the AI naysayers of this era such as Bernie Sanders who want to stifle AI development, it’s likely they will look very foolish a decade or two down the line after our technological advances cured diseases that have sickened our loved ones and increased productivity to such an extent that the typical work week may indeed be able to be lowered by a noticeable margin.
Of course, we should explore kill switches and collaborate on installing commonsense safeguards, but as noted above, the idea that we will save humanity from an AI disaster by the U.S. unilaterally halting its progress is recklessly naive, since our enemies will not be so constrained.
As the science advances, so will be the risks associated with it. It is something we are going to have to live with and control, just as was the case with nuclear weapons.
As long as some nation can obtain nukes, there’s no way we will ever get rid of all nukes. Likewise, as long as one nation can always push the AI envelope a bit further, we will never get to the point of a no-risk AI scenario. So we had better win this race.
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Steve Levy is President of Common Sense Strategies, a political consulting firm. He served as Suffolk County Executive, as a NYS Assemblyman, and host of the “On the Right Side Podcast.” He is the author of “Solutions to America’s Problems” and “Bias in the Media.” www.SteveLevy.info, steve@commonsensestrategies.com