Innovation is built upon an ecosystem that takes decades to mature. Yet, China has already made substantial advances in computer science, chemistry, engineering, and robotics, all of which pose a direct challenge to U.S. technological supremacy. However, the U.S. will remain dominant and largely unchallenged in biotech and medicine for the foreseeable future.
It is clear that U.S.-based technology companies will continue to shape the geo-economic trajectory of data governance, and thus play a key role in the trade, investment and diplomatic landscape in Asia. So long as the Big Tech lobby works closely in consultation with the governments of emerging economies to respect sovereign autonomy and promote citizen welfare over rabid corporate greed, it will continue to be a key stakeholder in shaping a free, fair and equitable digital future.
By acting as network architects and administrators, Beijing will be privy to data streams in real-time across a large portion of the world, enabling them to develop influence and power across a number of different matrixes.
Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinised — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files…
Since the invention of writing, human innovation has transformed how we formulate new ideas, organise our societies, and communicate with one another. But in an age of rapid-fire social media and nonstop algorithm-generated outrage, technology is no longer helping to expand or enrich the public sphere.
With 5G it is possible to do enormous amounts of computing at very high speeds and without having to connect the input device—a cell phone, say, or a self-driving car—to a wire of any kind. But those high speeds are possible only if the rest of the system (signal towers, base stations, distributed servers, and the megascale centers that house the data and do a great deal of computing themselves) is physically near enough to these input devices.
AI will change how wars are fought, but not the nature of war. War is still, and will forever be, applied violence to achieve a political goal. Like human nature itself, the fundamental qualities that define the nature of warfare are impervious to change. AI will, however, cause a shift in the character of war.
At the same time that science and technology have vastly improved human lives, they have also given certain visionaries the means to transform entire societies from above. Ominously, what was true of Soviet central planners is true of Big Tech today: namely, the assumption that society can be improved through pure “rationality.”
Freedom of speech, increasingly accepted of late as a general good, becomes problematic when coupled with deception, anonymity and the power of vast wealth to magnify some voices 1,000-fold over others. And for many spreaders of disinformation, getting a reader/viewer/voter actually to believe your untruths is not the only measure of success. Simply confusing them, encouraging them to doubt opposition truths, is just as good.
Elites have always used their privileged position and access to resources for self-serving purposes, not for the greater good of humanity. And this abuse continues, disguised, as elites harness artificial intelligence and other new technologies to reach new levels of power previously undreamed of. A new breed of elites is born: “ailites”.
