America Must Beat China in the Artificial Intelligence Race

In what is perhaps the tensest scene in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the spaceship's onboard artificial intelligence system HAL-9000 reads the lips of hiding crew members. Discovering their plans to turn it off, the system turns against all humans onboard for the sake of protecting the mission. What was once science fiction is now inching closer to reality thanks to artificial intelligence--but in the wrong hands it could open up terrifying possibilities. In 2018, Chinese researchers crafted a new dataset and surveillance application benchmarks for lip-reading in real-world settings. Though this tech was meant to aid the hearing-impaired, the Chinese are likely to use it to broaden their already expansive surveillance state.