Sixty years ago Russia shocked the world with the launch of the Sputnik satellite. Donald Trump was 11 years old. That display of superiority jolted America to outspend the USSR in a drive that produced the internet and the global positioning system. Today’s Sputnik moment, by contrast, appears to have bypassed America’s 71-year-old president. China openly plans to dominate artificial intelligence by 2030. Mr Trump appears too busy tweeting to have noticed.
Yet China’s AI ambitions pose a greater long-term threat to US security than North Korea’s nuclear reach. Pyongyang can probably be contained by the guarantee of annihilation. There is no obvious barrier to China’s aim of leapfrogging the US. “Whoever becomes the leader in [AI] will become the ruler of the world,” Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said recently. His observation followed China’s announcement that it intends to draw even with the US by 2020, overtake it by 2025 and dominate global AI five years after that. America’s leading technologists believe China’s ambitions are plausible. “Just stop for a sec,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, last week. “The Chinese government said that.”
Unlike Sputnik, there is no single Chinese action that is likely to drive the threat home. But the trend lines are stark for those who care to look. President Xi Jinping has broadcast China’s AI superiority as a strategic goal. Mr Trump has said nothing about America’s ambitions. But his budget proposal speaks volumes. He wants to cut US public funding of “intelligent systems” by 11 per cent and overall federal research and development spending by almost a fifth. Nasa’s budget would also shrink.