From the Wilson Quarterly:
From the reign of Peter the Great to the Soviet
era, and now under President Putin, Russia has
been intent to, as Lenin
termed it, “catch up and surpass” the West. That ambition applies to AI,
September
1, 2017. It was the first day of school in Russia, a much-beloved
unofficial holiday, and President Vladimir Putin was on stage in a
national TV broadcast, chatting with jeans-clad teenagers about the
future.
“
Artificial intelligence is the future,”
he told them, “not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes
with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to
predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler
of the world.”
Then,
this March, in the final moments of Putin’s re-election campaign, came
a stern message to lawmakers at his annual address to parliament: “The
speed of technological progress is accelerating sharply... Those who
manage to ride this technological wave will surge far ahead. Those who
fail to do this will be submerged and drown.”
“As soon as possible,”
Putin said,
Russia “needs to eliminate all barriers to the development and wide use
of robotic equipment, artificial intelligence, unmanned vehicles,
e-commerce, and big-data-processing technology.”
Spurred
from the top, could Russia one day muster real competition with the
great powers in the AI field? The implications of the question are
great, as indeed, current and potential applications of the technology
cross sectors and range from the beneficial to the malign. Russia’s
recent social-media-based propaganda campaigns to influence Western
elections employed only relatively basic AI, but achieved certain
impact. Today, it is unclear whether the country can achieve top AI
status, but from Washington to Beijing, other capitals are tracking
Moscow’s efforts.
The
undisputed world leaders in artificial intelligence are the United
States and China. Compared to their investment in the field, the Russian
government lags far behind. According to the Russian tech website
cnews.ru,
the size of the AI/machine learning market in the country was less than
$12 million in 2017. That’s estimated to grow, and markedly, to some
$460 million by 2020. Still, the figure is dwarfed by the roughly
$7.4 billion that the Pentagon budgeted last year on AI and allied fields like big data and cloud computing.
Yet even if Russia’s AI industry is in its nascence, Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, is nervous.
Looming
larger and larger in the Defense Department’s rear-view mirror is
China. Beijing alone plans to build an artificial intelligence
development park
with $2.12-billion price tag. By 2020, the country envisions developing
a domestic AI industry worth more than $24 billion, a figure that the
government says will more than double five years after that.
Yet
even if Russia’s AI industry is in its nascence, Google’s former CEO,
Eric Schmidt, is nervous. This January, at a BBC event in London, he was
asked about Vladimir Putin’s “ruler of the world” prediction.
“
I’m very concerned about this,”
he said. “I think both the Russian and the Chinese leaders have
recognized the value of this, not just for their commercial aspirations,
but also their military aspirations.”
From
Peter the Great in the 18th century to the Soviet era, and now under
Putin, Russia has been intent to, as Lenin termed it, “catch up and
surpass” the West. (In this case, the East, too.) The president’s
urgings should be viewed,
writes Samuel Bendett
of the American Foreign Policy Council, as “a recognition of Russia’s
current place in this unfolding technology race, and of the need by the
nation’s government, private sector, and the military to marshal the
needed resources to persevere in this domain.”
Find That Face
If Russia is to “ride this technological wave,” as Putin describes it, the country will need people like Artem Kukharenko.
About
three miles north of the Kremlin, in a small office inside a high-rise
building, Kukharenko is seated at his computer close to a large window,
silhouetted against Moscow’s skyline. On his computer screen is a
photograph of a woman’s face with a fine net of tiny white lines
displayed across it. It’s a depiction, he tells me, of the facial
recognition software that he and several fellow computer geeks developed
and then used as a springboard to start their company, NtechLab.
The
software relies on AI technology, employing algorithms to rapidly
compare photos of individuals against a face-image database. It can be
used for a wide variety of purposes: verifying a face to unlock a
smartphone; scanning shoppers to compile data on customers; locating
missing people; finding a potential date; identifying criminals; and, in
some cases, targeting political opponents...
....
MUCH MORE
