Wright N.D. (ed.) Artificial Intelligence, China, Russia, and the Global Order Technological, Political, Global, and Creative Perspectives

Maxwell: Air University Press, 2019. — 291 p.Given the wide-ranging implications for global competition, domestic political systems and daily life, US policymakers must prepare for the impacts of new artificial intelligence (AI)-related technologies. Anticipating AI’s impacts on the global order requires US policy makers’ awareness of certain key aspects of the AI-related technologies — and how those technologies will interact with the rapidly changing global system of human societies. One area that has received little in-depth examination to date is how AI-related technologies could affect countries’ domestic political systems — whether authoritarian, liberal democratic, or a hybrid of the two — and how they might impact global competition between different regimes.
This work highlights several key areas where AI-related technologies have clear implications for globally integrated strategic planning and requirements development:
Since 2012, new AI-related technologies have entered the real world with rapidly accelerating scale and speed. While the character of these technologies currently favors enhanced surveillance, it is limited by a need for extensive human involvement and the preparation of big-data platforms. This will likely dominate current efforts to incorporate AI into social governance, as we see now in China.
AI may help enable a plausible competitor to liberal democracy allowing large and industrially sophisticated states to make their citizens rich while maintaining rigid control. China is now building core components of such a system of digital authoritarianism. Such systems are already being emulated in a global competition with liberal democracy.
Russia has a different political regime than China. The Russian model is a hybrid that relies on a mix of less overt and often nontechnical mechanisms to manipulate online information flows. Competition for influence between digital liberal democracy and more authoritarian digital regimes will occur at many levels: international institutions (and norms), nation states, and corporations. The United States must adopt a multifaceted approach to influence with allies and crucial swing states. It must also carefully prevent unwanted escalation of this competition — as a number of contributors argue in this work, insecurity drives much of Chinese and Russian decision making.
China’s foreign policy decision making will not necessarily become more expansionist if its domestic regime becomes more authoritarian. Mapping out AI’s effects on foreign policy choices requires mapping them out within the domestic ecosystem and content from which those choices emanate.
Military dimensions of global competition will change with AI. Hackers become more prominent, and new crisis escalation risks emerge. Chinese domestic social governance systems that become ever more reliant on vast digital systems will be tempting targets for adversaries — a fact likely to prompt Chinese regime insecurity that may feed a spiraling security dilemma.
The emerging digital liberal democracy in the United States, digital hybrid regime in Russia, and digital authoritarian regime in China will each exert influences far beyond their physical borders. This competition for influence will likely prove a defining feature of the twenty-first-century global system. We must not be caught by surprise.