The former CEO of DeepMind believes the AI ​​arms race could end in disaster

reports that The AI ​​arms race is everywhereEven in this very post. But what if this framing is fundamentally dangerous?

This is Verity Harding’s vanity. Between 2016 and 2020, Harding spent her days updating politicians around the world, from Barack Obama to Emmanuel Macron, on counter-terrorism progress. Amnesty International. As head of global public policy at Google Deep MindHarding was responsible for sketching out the moral conundrums and potential dangers. At the time, she told WIRED in a recent interview, AI research was “rooted in international collaboration.” But somewhere along the way, the industry began to be shaped instead by rivalries — between individual labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, and between two global superpowers: the United States and China. The AI ​​arms race has become a metaphor today.

In a new essay anthology curated by Harding, Reframing the AI ​​arms raceShe and other figures from across global politics and academia, including historian Lawrence Friedman and Japanese politician Taro Kono, say the language used to describe AI sets the tone for policy-making and the terms of engagement between countries.

Harding believes that viewing AI as a lethal weapon risks closing the door on the kind of international cooperation needed to ensure the technology is safe and its benefits are evenly distributed. At the same time, for smaller powers that import technology, compromising on the arms race framework means aligning behind one great power or another, and perhaps against their own interests.

Harding sees the Trump administration Amnesty International’s National Discourse And her giving to Enforce export controls on domestic models as symptoms of an arms race framing – and evidence that a worst-case scenario is shaping up.

WIRED caught up with Harding in early June to discuss where the idea of ​​an arms race comes from, how the narrative shapes geopolitics, and what small nations can do to ensure they have a say in the development of artificial intelligence.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Wired: Why do you think people are drawn to war metaphors in relation to AI?

Hardness of truth: I just think it’s an interesting frame. It’s one of those things that seems so obvious, but if you dig deeper into it, it restricts your thinking.

When I was at DeepMind, my job was to try to help political leaders understand technology and what it might be capable of. This was rooted in the idea that technology was really exciting, but there were also things to worry about that were best dealt with in a collaborative and international way. What I began to notice (over time) was the idea that it was more of a civilizational battle: the West versus China.

What forces were behind this transformation?

One was the sincere belief that technology was dangerous – or would fall into the wrong hands – and that democracies should therefore hold its keys.

The other was an anti-regulation movement, for which it was useful to point to China as the bogeyman: “If you regulate us, you let China win.”

Do you point to any specific moment as a catalyst?

gbt chat (Launched in November 2022) suddenly made a lot of people interested in artificial intelligence. But other things happened at the same time.

ChatGPT emerged at the same time as the global pandemic, when people were panicking that the borderless world was once again surrounded by borders, and the war in Ukraine, when much of the discussion about artificial intelligence and geopolitics — especially weapons — suddenly became very real.

It is quickly becoming accepted wisdom that AI is the new arms race. It is drawn on the last arms race in living memory, the Cold War; People talked about it as being like a nuclear weapon.