The chief executive officer of government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. warned that the U.S. has only a small advantage over China in the rising field of artificial intelligence and is at risk of falling behind without a "national strategy." "It's not the 50-year edge that we have in building aircraft carriers," Horacio Rozanski said Thursday in a meeting with Bloomberg editors and reporters in Washington. Chinese President Xi Jinping has made a 10-fold increase in AI output a national priority as the world's second-largest economy seeks to dominate the industry by 2030. The U.S. has little formal AI strategy at the federal level, although resources and government projects have accelerated in the last year or so, Rozanski said. "The investments are being driven at this point by the strategies of the different parts of the government, as opposed to collective strategy," he said.

Washington: The chief executive officer of government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. warned that the US has only a small advantage over China in the rising field of artificial intelligence and is at risk of falling behind without a "national strategy." "It's not the 50-year edge that we have in building aircraft carriers," Horacio Rozanski said Thursday in a meeting with Bloomberg editors and reporters in Washington. Chinese President Xi Jinping has made a 10-fold increase in AI output a national priority as the world's second-largest economy seeks to dominate the industry by 2030. The US has little formal AI strategy at the federal level, although resources and government projects have accelerated in the last year or so, Rozanski said. "The investments are being driven at this point by the strategies of the different parts of the government, as opposed to collective strategy," he said.

It seems as if everybody is starting to look at artificial intelligence as some sort of make-or-break technology for the human race. Where the fate of the planet is concerned, there is an increasing collision between the nationalistic view that AI's overriding purpose is to help countries hold their own in geopolitical struggles and the humanitarian view that AI should deliver the benefits of material prosperity to all peoples, serving as an activist force in the universal struggle for equality, free expression, personal autonomy and democratic governance. The nationalistic perspective keeps popping out in headlines. For example, there are the sentiments expressed in this recent article by Horacio Rozanski, chief executive of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. He discusses what he regards as a "close race" between the United States and China in developing and exploiting AI. I've been exploring AI benchmarking initiatives recently, and I take issue with the assumption that we can validly benchmark one nation against another in this regard.