Open debate about the ethics of tech is a strength, not a weakness, of the U.S. system.
As China seeks a deeper fusion between defense and commercial technological development, the bridges that the U.S. Defense Department has been seeking to build to Silicon Valley seem precarious. Google faced intense backlash against its work with the Pentagon’s Project Maven, ultimately deciding not to renew the contract—even though this engagement appears to be consistent with the ethical principles that Google has since released. When ethics collide with strategic competition in artificial intelligence, the United States can seem to be at a disadvantage.
In contrast to the resistance from Silicon Valley in the United States, China is stepping up a national strategy of “military-civil fusion” (also translated as “civil-military integration”) that concentrates on creating and leveraging ways to cooperate on these dual-use technologies, enlisting technology companies and universities, including tech giant Baidu and Tsinghua University, to promote their military applications. It might seem as though China has the edge here, given Beijing’s power to command the tech sector. But the Chinese system also has critical weaknesses—and the U.S. one has unexpected strengths.
The recent controversies reflect Google’s international nature. While its headquarters are in the United States, Google employees come from a growing number of countries. Google has established AI research centers in Paris, New York, and Tokyo, as well as in Beijing last winter, with one in Accra, Ghana, opening soon. That international character is a unique strength and competitive advantage—particularly in the global quest for AI talent—but inherently complicates arguments that Google should support the U.S. military and advance U.S. national security interests.
The campaign against the company’s involvement in the development of warfare technology reflected globalized engagement and mobilization in response to intense concerns and controversy over the weaponization of AI.This activism at Google is occurring at a time when tech workers in the United States are actively organizing to resist and protest, spurred by intense concerns over the policies of the Trump administration. In particular, U.S. staff are demanding that Microsoft, Palantir, and other tech companies cancel their contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to prevent the abuse of their technologies to enable cruel policies and human rights violations.
Google’s secret development of a search engine that it plans to launch in China—which will comply with censorship and will “blacklist sensitive queries,” such as searches about issues of human rights and democracy—may also confront strong resistance from the company’s workforce.
These open debates—and the freedom to challenge authority—are integral to and inextricable from the creativity and risk-taking that are vital to innovation in U.S. technology ecosystems such as Silicon Valley.
It is difficult to imagine a similar campaign could have occurred, let alone succeeded, in China. Even though leading Chinese technology companies are starting to become international in their presence, workforce, and activities, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has reasserted its authority over them. Chinese President Xi Jinping has declared that the party “leads everything,” a troubling re-emergence of a Mao-era sentiment. The CCP has expanded its presence within major tech companies; a majority of them even have party secretaries who represent the CCP’s interests and authority, including the “big three” of Chinese tech: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent.
The CCP has also sought to co-opt the leaders of tech companies into the structure of the party itself, including through their inclusion in United Front Work organizations such as the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
This spring, in an uncharacteristic (and later censored) moment of candor, the CEO of Sogou, a tech company known for its search engine and development of speech recognition technologies, declared, “We’re entering an era in which we’ll be fused together. It might be that there will be a request to establish a Party committee within your company, or that you should let state investors take a stake … as a form of mixed ownership. If you think clearly about this, you really can resonate together with the state. You can receive massive support. But if it’s your nature to go your own way, to think that your interests differ from what the state is advocating, then you’ll probably find that things are painful, more painful than in the past.”
China’s “national champions,” as well as start-ups and emerging enterprises, in AI are becoming ever more closely linked to party-state priorities, including development of surveillance capabilities. For instance, iFlytek—known for creating “China’s Siri”—which recently established a partnership with MIT, has also been involved in the development of surveillance capabilities in Xinjiang that leverage its smart voice technologies. There are numerous examples of facial recognition companies, such as Yitu Tech and SenseTime, that directly support policing and public security within a system in which these capabilities are often abused.
At the same time, as the Chinese People’s Liberation Army pursues a range of military applications of AI, leading universities and enterprises are actively supporting these developments. Tsinghua University, often characterized as China’s MIT, has highlighted its commitment to supporting China’s national strategy of military-civil fusion, including establishing the Military-Civil Fusion National Defense Peak Technologies Laboratory and building the High-End Military Intelligence Laboratory with support from the Central Military Commission. Meanwhile, Baidu has partnered with a research institute from the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, a state-owned defense industry conglomerate, to create the Joint Laboratory for Intelligent Command and Control Technologies, which will focus on using big data, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing to enhance military command information systems....MUCH MORE
