As I have written in several blogs, the first nation to generate a workable, reliable and sustainable plasma computer – moving from what has become the ubiquitous but increasingly obsolete binary “digital” standard (everything requires translation into 0s and 1s in order to process) – will be able to process thousands, if not millions, of times faster that the fastest supercomputers we have today. Working instead on a multilevel, simultaneous calculation platform, using qubits instead of binary digits, future plasma/AI systems can ply through the most sophisticated encryption systems… a piece of cake. Blockchain? Seriously? Toast.
Combined with an increasingly, self-building world of artificial intelligence, that winner of the plasma computer race can plunge into any nation’s most guarded secrets, can invade our entire financial system and perhaps even take over or manipulate any system relying on automation that is part of any linked system (including weapons control, GPS, banking and exchange platforms, gathering personal data on steroids, etc.). Second only to climate change as a human-induced existential threat, this future world remains a toxic, multinational race to global domination. When that master switch is enabled, this force could also turn off any parallel efforts elsewhere to create the same capabilities that might threaten that first mover.
Given the volatility of political systems the world over, the segmentation of self-interest and desire for supremacy everywhere, the most necessary global cooperation required to stop that toxic technology race defies our ability to create and enforce global standards with everyone on board. Nuclear restriction treaties, climate accords and cooperation against a loosely defined threat of global “terrorism,” etc. fall by the wayside all the time. As a movement against global cooperation finds resistance from major political forces in many nations – like the MAGA movement right here in the United States – is there any hope of containing this looming virulent threat that hangs over all of us?
While plasma computing remains in the back pages of our mass media, even though it remains a major component of possible single-nation domination, the battle for uniform standards and limitations on actively ubiquitous and growing artificial intelligence, the other major component of that tech takeover, is in the headlines every day. Big government and big tech are all over it, touting alliances and advances that we do not yet fully comprehend. It merits taking a closer look at how uncertain necessary global standards and limitations battle over AI alone. Labeling this uncoordinated and dangerously unregulated competitive world “AI Nationalism,” Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur, writing for the August 14th The Morning New York Times feed, describe the dangerous chaos:
“As artificial intelligence advances, many nations are worried about being left behind… The urgency is understandable. A.I. is improving quickly. It could soon reshape the global economy, automate jobs, turbocharge scientific research and even change how wars are waged. World leaders want companies in their country to control A.I. — and they want to benefit from its power. They fear that if they do not build powerful A.I. at home, they will be left dependent on a foreign country’s creations.
So A.I. nationalism — the idea that a country must develop its own tech to serve its own interests — is spreading. Countries have enacted new laws and regulations. They’ve formed new alliances. The United States, perhaps the best positioned in the global A.I. race, is using trade policy to cut off China from key microchips. In France, the president has heaped praise upon a startup focused on chatbots and other tools that excel in French and other non-English languages. And in Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is pouring billions into A.I. development and striking deals with companies like Amazon, I.B.M. and Microsoft to make his country a major new hub… ‘We must rise to the challenge of A.I., or risk losing the control of our future,’ warned a recent report by the French government…
“The race to control A.I. started, in part, with a board game. In 2016, computers made by Google’s DeepMind won high-profile matches in the board game Go, demonstrating a breakthrough in the ability of A.I. to behave in humanlike ways. Beijing took note. Chinese officials set aside billions and crafted a policy to become a world leader in A.I. Officials integrated A.I. into the country’s vast surveillance system, giving the technology a uniquely authoritarian bent… Still, China’s best firms were caught off guard by OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in 2022. The companies raced to catch up. They’ve made some progress, but censorship and regulations have hampered development…
“The U.S. has advantages other countries cannot yet match. American tech giants control the most powerful A.I. models and spend more than companies abroad to build them. Top engineers and developers still aspire to a career in Silicon Valley. Few regulations stand in the way of development. American firms have the easiest access to precious A.I. chips, mostly designed by Nvidia in California… The White House is using these chips to undercut Chinese competition. In 2022, the U.S. imposed new rules that cut China off from the chips. Without them, companies simply cannot keep pace.
“The U.S. is also using chips as leverage over other countries. In April, Microsoft worked with the U.S. government to cut a deal with a state-linked Emirati company to give it access to powerful chips. In exchange, the firm had to stop using much of its Chinese technology and submit to U.S. government and Microsoft oversight. Saudi Arabia could make a similar deal soon…
“Looming over the development of A.I. are lessons of the past. Many countries watched major American companies — Facebook, Google, Amazon — reshape their societies, not always for the better. They want A.I. to be developed differently. The aim is to capture the benefits of the technology in areas like health care and education without undercutting privacy or spreading misinformation.
“The E.U. is leading the push for regulation. Last year, it passed a law to limit the use of A.I. in realms that policymakers considered the riskiest to human rights and safety. The U.S. has required companies to limit the spread of deep fakes. In China, where A.I. has been used to surveil its citizens, the government is censoring what chatbots can say and restricting what kind of data that algorithms can be trained on.
“A.I. nationalism is part of a wider fracturing of the internet, where services vary based on local laws and national interests. What’s left is a new kind of tech world where the effects of A.I. in your life may just depend on where you live.” In short, this multinational spate of complex regulations, along with industrial and traditional spying, has ramped up to new uncoordinated and perhaps dangerous levels. Toxic alliances against US interests, like the new China-Russia-North Korea cabal, will press against that level playing field. With a gridlocked Congress, even domestically, we are increasingly forced to rely on state rules (usually led by California) and the global reach of regulations being posited by the European Union against US entities doing just about anything that reaches the EU.
I’m Peter Dekom, and accelerating technology and reconfigured global alliances simply do not wait for a dysfunctional polarized United States to find a path to unity and functionality; many other nations are actually betting that we do not.
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