Much of this purported strategy hinges on 'winning' at all cost by undermining the lead.
What is there to be won at the end? Does one party taking the reigns prevent the other from achieving similar capabilities? Is it necessary to win this race?
Or is this a cumulative, distributed effort that benefits all of us?
Whether it's true or not, world leader's ears are being filled with the claim that whoever wins the AI race wins everything, because AI will be able to win every other contest. They're being told it is winner-take-all like no contest has been winner-take-all before.
And they're all stupid enough to actually believe it? Why would a world leader listen to anyone in tech? They should ask an actual expert.
Edit: to be clear, what I mean is that to a first approximation technologists are charlatans and frauds. If you're looking for accurate information ask a scientist.
From a politician's perspective, scientists are like gold prospectors digging holes seemingly at random. $100 billion startups are what you get when the prospectors strike gold.
Why would you discuss gold with the wild-haired eccentric at the bottom of a hole, who has not yet found any gold, when you could talk to a gold mine owner who has - and who employs 1500 voters, and who like you wears a suit and tie?
> world leader's ears are being filled with the claim that whoever wins the AI race wins everything, because AI will be able to win every other contest
This describes a narrow slice of Silicon Valley numpties.
World leaders see an economic opportunity. Both to spend and to produce. No politician will turn down the opportunity to announce half a trillion dollars of spending.
> Or is this a cumulative, distributed effort that benefits all of us?
This. There are a few theories of geopolitics, one of the most successful being ones we be bunch under an umbrella called realism [1]. (The others are idealism [2] and liberalism [3]. Historia Civilis made a great three-part video series on these [4]. Note that Realpolitik [5], which relates to realism as its praxis, is not the same thing.)
One of the consequences of realism is balance of power theory, which “suggests that states may secure their survival by preventing any one state from gaining enough military power to dominate all others” [6].
What is to be won? Not being dominated; ideally: less war, since war is irrational. (See: Ukraine.) Does preventing others from dominating you prevent you from dominating others? No. Is it necessary to win? No. But that means ceding sovereignty and increasing the chances of violent conflict as geopolitical fault lines reälign.
A note on liberalism: it works. But it requires great power at its centre. America was that benevolent great power. Now it seems we don’t want to be. The power America has to hurt its allies, and the incentives to reap that advantage, is the consistent failure mode of liberal foreign-relation structures, since the days of the Delian League.
Much of this purported strategy hinges on 'winning' at all cost by undermining the lead.
What is there to be won at the end? Does one party taking the reigns prevent the other from achieving similar capabilities? Is it necessary to win this race?
Or is this a cumulative, distributed effort that benefits all of us?