Cold War Analogies are Warping Tech Policy

Or many Cold Wars, it seems. Pundits and politicians alike declaim that we're locked in a "new Cold War" with China, that we're in the throes of a "cyber arms race" with the rest of the world, and that Russia's election interference is, of course, today's 1960s contestation over political ideology. Justin Sherman (@jshermcyber) is a Cybersecurity Policy Fellow at New America. These tempting, easy-to-understand Cold War metaphors pervade policy discourse around emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Peter Thiel notably deployed such metaphors in his recent (quite flawed) New York Times op-ed about AI and national security.