Almost two years after China first laid out its plan to become the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030, the United States on Monday released its own playbook.
The document, an executive order from President Donald Trump, explained his administration’s views on developing artificial intelligence, but left open a major question: Where’s the money?
“Money talks when it comes to government priorities, and new money actually drives priorities.” said R. David Edelman, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama for technology policy.
Trump’s executive order, which did not include any new funding for AI research, comes amid mounting tension over China’s ambitious efforts. China in 2017 laid out a national plan to try to develop AI technology, an ambition that was likened to the Apollo missions to the moon and set off anxiety within the U.S. as the Trump White House was silent.
“It’s kind of a new arms race,” said Theresa Payton, chief information officer under President George W. Bush.
But AI isn’t just about weaponry. The technology is seen by many policymakers, technologists and scholars as having a key role in the future of business, governance and just about any other part of human life, posing difficult questions about the tradeoffs between unrestricted growth and the need to keep pace with an international rival.
“The arms race use to be about weaponry,” Payton said. “But who is going to be the economic powerhouse? A lot of that is going to rest on who owns and controls the latest technology.”
Follow the leader
Though it may be best known from movies about killer robots, AI in real life is being developed to help automate a variety of tasks from the difficult to the mundane. Researchers are programming AI to help diagnose diseases, improve internet services, speed up transportation and more accurately target weapons in war. AI is generally understood as computer code that can improve its capabilities over time based on the data it is fed.
China’s plan put the world on notice about the country’s AI ambitions, but it also served to highlight the head start that the U.S. had gained. Much of the world’s leading research in AI takes place within private U.S. companies such as Google, and Trump’s executive order does not lay out a plan to change that.
And the U.S. continues to be the top destination for global investment in AI startups. CB Insights, a firm that tracks venture capital spending, found that more than half of the $19.2 billion invested in AI startups in 2018 went to companies based in the U.S.
Instead, the order tells heads of federal agencies to consider AI as a priority when drawing up plans for research and development. Unless Congress appropriates money, agencies will have to find it by cutting others parts of their budgets, and it’s not clear what they might cut or when.
The executive order is the first attempt by the Trump administration to lay out its views about artificial intelligence. It says AI “promises to drive growth” and that the US must “maintain leadership” in the field, and it puts agencies on notice that the White House expects them to pay attention to the subject. It also encourages the availability of big data sets that could be used to train AI. systems.
To the extent agencies find money, it would go toward research as well as programs for educational and workforce training, according to the executive order. But the lack of money amounts to an “unfunded mandate,” Payton said.
Asked about the absence of new money, a Trump administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said federal agencies will be required to report on their funding plans to White House officials, ensuring compliance with the order.
With regard to Chinese competition, the official said the administration welcomes collaboration with like-minded partners to promote the beneficial uses of AI and also to protect the U.S. technological advantage in AI from adversarial nations.
A hornet's nest of regulation
Experts who spoke with NBC News said they took China seriously as a competitor in the development of AI but noted that public perception of China’s current capabilities had become overstated.
A paper last year from Jeffrey Ding, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute specializing in China’s AI strategy, concluded that the U.S. was well ahead of China in the field, with 33 percent of the world’s total AI capabilities compared to 17 percent for China.
“I think there’s significant overinflation of Chinese AI capabilities, especially among U.S. policy-making circles,” Ding said.
