The AI-powered ChatGPT is intensifying the competition between the United States and China for artificial intelligence dominance. The stakes couldn’t be higher. For the sake of clarity, ChatGPT is an AI-driven tool that can create documents, reports, and other content with just a question or a few keywords. It was created by OpenAI, a Bay Area technology firm started by tech standouts such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and other tech luminaries.
The good news is how ChatGPT has brought the race for AI dominance back into the national conversation. The potential for AI technology to alter our world is difficult to overstate, even though ChatGPT technology itself barely scratches the surface of what AI technology can really do.
Both the United States and China are fully engaged in efforts to master AI technology in its most powerful applications, which includes creating so-called “deep fakes” that put words into people’s mouths and put people in places they never were. Even those capabilities are mere shadows of what is to come.
In a few short years at most, the way we do even the most common tasks, from manufacturing goods, transporting them, and marketing them will be radically changed. Medicines, machines, and methodologies of inquiry will all be fundamentally different under AI. AI will change every activity or industry to which it is applied, and that includes rapid advancements in biotechnology and its transformational impact on warfare.
That’s what makes AI a qualitatively different technology from all others. It will forever alter the relationship between humanity and machines. Humanity’s great innovation was the replication and transformation of the natural world into the mechanization and manipulation of it. It was only just over a century ago that mankind transitioned from horse to automobile, then on to the flight, and then to space flight.
