Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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The fourth “battlefield” is maybe the most critical: the ultimate global leader in AI will have institutions that effectively incorporate AI into their economy, society, and especially their military. Those comments seem mostly true, but carefully selected to overstate the differences between the countries.

AI is already having profound effects on world rivals—the US, China and Russia—and its game-changing technology advancements will exacerbate these conditions. I’m glad I read this but it was much more policy heavy than I anticipated (especially US policy regarding China, but also DoD acquisition policy and international policy to establish AI norms and guard rails) — important stuff but not what I was most interested in and those areas felt pretty repetitive at times. My intuition says this is mostly more important than is deploying the AI technology that existed in 2022. I. expert Paul Scharre offers a contemporary exploration of artificial intelligence that will make skeptics worried but also offers solutions to how we should move forward as a species in this new wild west of technological development. Brother's perspective on international relations, particularly the nuanced approach to China and technology cooperation, is thought-provoking.Scharre delves deeply into each area, noting that fundamental differences between authoritarian China and democratic U.

It is unlikely that TII expected Falcon to top Hugging Face’s Leaderboard but consider the broader context here: using the comparatively limited compute and talent available to TII, they chose to build a model in the same family as OpenAI’s GPT-3 while making the conscious decision to fully open-source the model, rather unlike OpenAI’s decision to keep its most advanced systems’ technical details secret. I was surprised at the avoidance of science fiction examples, especially when the book considers problems of AI taking over human decision making.

Lastly, hopefully this was an issue limited to the DoD Library’s copy of the audiobook on Libby, but it was one 13-hour track! The book was structured well starting with what is AI in reality and moving on to the infrastructure and institutions surrounding AI around the world to ultimately putting context behind the media headlines we are seeing.

Four Battlegrounds straddles two lines of thought: the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on power and warfare in the 21st century and the dangers AI presents to human freedoms, individual rights, and the meaning of truth and reality.Otherwise, Four Battlegrounds is a fantastic, oftentimes terrifying exploration of what is going on in the world of artificial intelligence.

Parts describing inner work of Pentagon in adopting AI, along some general descriptions of current AI strengths and limitations are good.I'm angry at Scharre for trying to steer us toward war without articulating a sensible justification for war. But because AI’s four components are taken to vary in relative importance as AI matures over time, and because states have varying access to these four components, as well as a range of intentional choices for harnessing them, Scharre’s framework is global in scope. Its developers borrowed from some fundamental features of GPT-3 and machine learning generally (insofar as the quality of its training data — an underappreciated but established aspect of the field — was a priority), while also making modifications that improve its performance and lower computational burdens. But, for the commercial or military deployment of AI systems, especially for high-stakes medical, financial, or defense purposes, it is clear that they must be improved to this end.