China has won the artificial intelligence battle with the United States and is heading towards global dominance because of its technological advances, the Pentagon’s former software chief told the Financial Times.
China, the world’s second largest economy, is likely to dominate many of the key emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and genetics within a decade or so, according to Western intelligence assessments.
Nicolas Chaillan, the Pentagon’s first chief software officer who resigned in protest against the slow pace of technological transformation in the U.S. military, said the failure to respond was putting the United States at risk.
China was set to dominate the future of the world, controlling everything from media narratives to geopolitics, he said.
Chaillan blamed sluggish innovation, the reluctance of U.S. companies such as Google to work with the state on AI and extensive ethical debates over the technology.
Chinese companies, Chaillan said, were obliged to work with their government and were making “massive investment” in AI without regard to ethics.
He said U.S. cyber defences in some government departments were at “kindergarten level”.
Chaillan announced his resignation at the beginning of September, saying military officials were repeatedly put in charge of cyber initiatives for which they lacked experience.
