China cannot beat the US in AI

What about a related nightmare — that AI will help the forces of tyranny control the future? Analysts such as Yuval Noah Harari have warned that artificial intelligence will reduce the costs and increase the returns from repression. AI-equipped intelligence services will need less manpower to decipher the vast amounts of intelligence they gather on their populations — allowing them, for example, to precisely map and remorselessly dismantle protest networks. They will use AI-enabled facial recognition technology to monitor and control their citizens, while employing AI-created disinformation to discredit critics at home and abroad. By making autocracy increasingly efficient, AI could allow the dictators to dominate the dawning age.

This is certainly what China hopes for. President Xi Jinping’s government has devised a “social credit” system that uses AI, facial recognition and big data to ensure the reliability of its citizens — by regulating their access to everything from low-interest loans to airplane tickets. Ubiquitous, AI-assisted surveillance has turned Xinjiang into a dystopian model of modern repression.

Beijing intends to seize the “strategic commanding heights” of innovation because it believes AI can bolster its domestic system and its military muscle. It is using the power of the illiberal state to steer money and talent toward advanced technologies.

It’s not a given, though, that the autocracies will come out ahead.

To believe that AI fundamentally favors autocracy is to believe that some of the most vital, longstanding enablers of innovation — such as open flows of information and tolerance for dissent — are no longer so important. Yet autocracy is already limiting China’s potential.

Building powerful large language models requires huge pools of information. But if those inputs are tainted or biased because China’s internet is so heavily censored, the quality of the outputs will suffer. An increasingly repressive system will also struggle, over time, to attract top talent: It is telling that 38% of top AI researchers in the US are originally from China. And smart technology must still be used by China’s governing institutions, which are getting progressively less smart — that is, less technocratically competent — as the political system becomes ever more subservient to an emperor-for-life.

China will be a formidable technological competitor. But even in the age of AI, Xi and his illiberal brethren may struggle to escape the competitive drag autocracy creates.