US issues recommendations for countering China in AI

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) published a report with recommendations for President Joe Biden, Congress, business leaders and the government on preserving the United States’ technological dominance. The commissioners approved 756-страничный отчет on a vote on March 1, according to Venture Beat.

The authors of the report proposed doubling AI R&D spending by 2026. The commission described $40 billion in investments to democratize AI R&D as “a modest down payment for future breakthroughs.” The group expects that in the coming years the federal government will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI.

It also urged creating a corps to hire technical specialists, establishing a Digital Services Academy to train civil servants, and tripling the number of national AI research institutes.

To ensure national security, the authors recommend automating most intelligence tasks, identifying military personnel with technical thinking, and appointing AI leaders responsible in every national-security agency and in every branch of the armed forces.

For the private sector, the commission proposed creating an organization to address inequality and expanding access to open-source software for federal agencies, including the Pentagon.

The authors described TensorFlow and PyTorch as “essential tools in the AI developer’s toolkit.”

China, according to the group, poses the main challenge to U.S. technological dominance, threatening economic and military power for the first time since the end of World War II. The commissioners urge the United States to build a coalition of advanced technologies with allies and to maintain a continuous high-level diplomatic dialogue with the Chinese government to cooperate in addressing global problems such as climate change.

In defense, the commissioners do not back a global ban on autonomous weapons using AI. The commission concluded that China and Russia would ignore any such commitment. Instead, the report calls for developing standards for autonomous weapons.

In other matters related to foreign policy and international affairs, the agency calls for an international agreement never to automate the use of nuclear weapons, and to secure similar commitments from Russia and China.

The publication of the final report is the culmination of the work of a temporary congressional commission formed in 2018. The group included top executives from Oracle, Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy, at a meeting convened to approve the report, expressed the hope that Congress would study the report and its recommendations in depth.

“I think there is a serious need to get on with solving these tasks, and it’s important to understand that you can’t simply flip a switch and deploy these capabilities. Realising them requires persistent and focused work over a long period,” Jassy said.

Now, according to members of the commission, work begins to promote these ideas among key decision-makers in government.

In conclusion, the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which would have increased investments in AI technologies by $6.4 billion over five years, vetoed by President Donald Trump, but Congress overrode the veto.

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