WHAT: The United States is in a new arms race with Russia and China; the Pentagon just released (Feb. EXPERT: Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, vice president for Purdue University's Discovery Park, is an expert in emerging technologies, including AI and quantum information systems. He was also a speaker at a May 2018 White House summit, "Artificial Intelligence for American Industry." QUOTE from de la Rubia: "We live today again in a world of great power competition. Those groups and nations that innovate most effectively and dominate the AI technology landscape will not only control commercial markets but will also hold a very significant advantage in future warfare and defense. In many respects, the threat of AI-based weapons is perhaps as existential a threat to the future national security of the United States and its allies as nuclear weapons were at the end of World War II."

The computer chip industry over the last couple of decades has seen its innovation stem from just a few top players like Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm. In this same time span, the VC industry has shown waning interest in start-up companies that made computer chips. The risk was just too great; how could a start-up compete with a behemoth like Intel which made the CPUs that operated more than 80% of the world's PCs? In areas that that Intel wasn't the dominate force, companies like Qualcomm and NVIDIA were a force for the smartphone and gaming markets. The recent resurgence of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has upended this status quo. It turns out that AI benefits from specific types of processors that perform operations in parallel, and this fact opens up tremendous opportunities for newcomers.

Americans are torn over the promise of artificial intelligence, a new poll showed Wednesday, expressing broad optimism about the emerging technologies but also fearing their negative impacts--including job losses, a poll showed Wednesday. The Gallup survey showed 79 percent of Americans say artificial intelligence has had a "mostly positive" or "very positive" impact on their lives thus far. At the same time, 73 percent said they expect the increased use of AI will eliminate more jobs than it creates and 63 percent predicted that new technologies and smart machines would widen the gap between rich and poor. Asked about autonomous vehicles, 42 percent of respondents said they would be "extremely uncomfortable" riding in a self-driving car and 62 percent would be concerned about sharing the road with self-driving trucks. "In general it's fair to say there is optimism and also anxiety," said Brandon Busteed of Gallup, which conducted the survey with Northeastern University.