AI will determine the next global superpower — key to military dominance.

Scharre previously served as a strategic planner at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, working to establish policies on unmanned and autonomous systems and emerging weapons technologies, and established DOD policies on intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance programs.

In his latest book, "Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence," Scharre explores how the international battle for the most powerful AI technology is changing global power dynamics. That battle, he says, is a global competition to seek the best and most efficient data, computing hardware, human talent, and institutions adopting AI technology — which will determine the next global superpower.

This conversation with Scharre has been lightly edited for length and clarity

In your new book, you argue there's a battle for global power going on in the form of a revolution brought about by artificial intelligence. What are the stakes of that battle?

So we saw during the Industrial Revolution that nations rose and fell on the global stage based on how rapidly they industrialized. Now, technology is this key enabler of political, economic, and military power. And I think that AI technologies are extremely powerful tools for a country's or society's ability to shape global progress and the international environment.

I do not want to live in a world where the Chinese Communist Party has that level of influence over global affairs. I find that concerning given their egregious human rights abuses at home, their bullying of their neighbors and abroad, their threatening of Taiwan and other countries in the region with military aggression, their militarization of the South China Sea. And I think it's part of the risk is not just about economic and military power and political power, but the spread of China's model of governance, their techno-authoritarianism, through adoption of their AI systems.

Other countries are increasingly emulating China's laws and norms for how to use technology for surveillance and repression at home — some of the social software that sits on top of the hardware of this surveillance technology itself. And of course, this fits into a broader trend we've seen of democratic backsliding in a number of countries and so I do think that we shouldn't take democracy for granted at home or abroad. And it's really important that democracies push back against these authoritarian trends.

And it isn't a typical battle, as we aren't directly at war, so where is the action happening?

So the book explores the US/China rivalry in artificial intelligence and the book comes looks at what's happening with artificial intelligence as a general purpose technology, much like electricity or computer networks or the internal combustion engine. And like those other technologies, it has a wide variety of applications across society. The book concludes that the four key battlegrounds of global competition: in artificial intelligence, or data, computing hardware or compute, human talent, and the institutions necessary to successfully adopt AI systems.

Probably the most foundational application of AI that will help advance national power is the widespread application of AI to enhanced economic productivity and scientific research. When AI technology is adopted in a wide range of industries and increases economic productivity, that's going to have second and third order effects on national power by increasing the GDP, and then allowing the nation to turn economic productivity into other, sometimes more tangible tools of national power — whether it's for the intelligence services building satellites and processing intelligence information that's collected or building military forces.

What practical applications does AI have for the intelligence community or military operations?

AI tech has a lot of potential in intelligence applications. I think it's quite likely that the US Defense Department and intelligence community use AI to analyze imagery whether from satellites or drones and, while they haven't acknowledged this publicly, it's very possible that's playing a role in the information that the US is sharing with Ukraine. We have seen some other examples of AI technology being used directly by Ukrainian forces on the ground, particularly some of the civilian drone operators. And this highlights just really how ubiquitous AI technology is that you don't need to be the world's most advanced person to use the technology, it's pretty widely available.

We're also seeing in the war in Ukraine the importance of logistics, for example, and maintenance operations, and that's the kind of thing where the bulk of what militaries do on a day-to-day basis is move people and things from point A to point B — it looks a lot like Walmart or Amazon does, it's just what happens at the end that's different. And so that's a place where militaries can improve their logistics, readiness, and finance. and personnel, and maintenance by 5%, the sum total of those effects in terms of military effectiveness could be quite significant and quite transformative.

And is AI transforming traditional warfare, as well?

As far as military advancements in warfare, there are also some examples. In the DARPA Alpha Dog competition, the goal was to build an AI agent that could achieve superhuman performance in a simulator against a human in dogfighting, which is considered by humans to be sort of the ultimate crucible of human pilots. To make a long story short, the AI succeeded, went head to head against an experienced Air Force pilot and absolutely crushed the human pilot, 15 to zero — the human didn't get a single shot off against the AI.

In particular, head-to-head gunshots are actually banned in training by human pilots because there's a high risk of collision if the pilot is trying to maneuver the aircraft when you're racing each other hundreds of miles an hour. And it's extremely difficult to do in any case and requires superhuman levels of precision, but none of that was a problem for the AI agent. It can achieve these split-second shots while also avoiding a collision. And the AI agent learned to do this all on its own — it wasn't trained to do that. The AI system that won was trained in a simulator and had over 30 years of simulated flying time and this was one of the things that it simply learned on its own from all of these years of simulated dogfights.