> Many other major powers have heavily invested in AI across all fronts (including military applications), and it would be stupid for the US to not have one of its' largest strategic assets to not be part of the process.
I'd say it's stupid for people to fuel those "powers" that use real, threatened or imagined conflict with each other to exploit and control mostly them.
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from...
> WALLACE: Of course, our, our main concern as human beings, certainly in this part of the world, is to survive, and to stay free, and to realize ourselves. How does all that you've said affect our ability to survive, and to stay free, in this world that is now in crisis?
> FROMM: Well, I think you touch upon a very important point here: namely, we must make a decision of values...If our supreme value is the development of the Western tradition - of a man for whom the highest thing in life is man, for whom love for man, respect for man, and the dignity of man, are supreme values - then we cannot ask the question that says, "if it is better for our survival, might we drop these values?" If these are supreme values, then they are there, and whether we live or we die, we shall not change these values. But if we begin to say, "Well, maybe we can cope better with the Russians if we also transform ourselves into a managed society......if we, as somebody put it the other day, train our soldiers to be like the Turks, who have fought so bravely in Korea...if we are willing to change our whole way of life for the sake of so-called "survival," then I think we do exactly that which threatens our survival. Because our vitality, and the vitality of each nation, rests on the sincerity and depth of the faith in the ideas which it announces, or pronounces. I think our danger is that we talk one thing, and we feel and act another thing.
Generally, whenever I hear people talk about inevitability, while ignoring how much of our world "is" because of the things we repeatedly decide to do, I have to think of Richard Stallman:
> Somebody is saying this is inevitable - and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.
As for China and how we must not allow a mineshaft gap, there's this Chinese proverb:
> He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount.
If you don't have corpses in your basement, there's a lot of people scared shitless of you, and they'd love nothing more than for you to get onboard. Don't get onboard.