Communist China, Seeking To Erase America’s Lead in AI, Takes a Page From Soviet Union’s Atomic Playbook

Americans are leading in the artificial intelligence race, a fact that will loom large when President Xi Jinping of Communist China meets with President Trump next week. Beijing’s communist system is making efforts to close the technology gap difficult; so they’re using a forgotten bit of Cold War deception to buy time.On Wednesday, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres of the United Nations said that “the world cannot afford a race to the bottom on AI safety.” His remarks were a rebuke to Mr. Trump. Monday on Truth Social, the president pushed back on “the AI Hoax,” likening it to warnings that “everyone was going to die from extreme heat.”The independent of Vermont, Senator Bernie Sanders, attended the Pro-Human Assembly at Washington D.C. last week and, earlier this month, he introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. Like many on the left, he has replaced climate doomsaying with warnings about AI, fixing blame on America while holding Communist China innocent.Mr. Sanders wrote in a statement that his bill aims “to stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control.” Such rhetoric invokes a ubiquitous sci-fi trope depicted too often not to fear. The legislation “would permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI” in America. It would also “direct the U.S. to pursue international agreements.”Yet it’s doubtful that foes like Communist China would abide by any such agreement. While Mr. Xi will pay lip service to the need for regulating AI next week, expect that he’s employing a strategy that the USSR developed when America detonated the world’s first atomic bomb on July 16, 1945.That mushroom cloud cancelled out the advantage the USSR had with conventional forces in Europe and struck fear into the Kremlin. Although allied with America against Germany in World War II, the communists sought to defeat the West, but lacked the scientific knowhow or even the uranium to make bombs.Augmenting their research through espionage, the USSR began work on their own nuclear program in secret. Meanwhile, Soviet diplomats gave speeches pushing for the immediate prohibition of atomic weapons at the UN and backed Western “No Nukes” protests to “Ban the Bomb.”The USSR’s party boss, Joseph Stalin, in a classic misdirection, dismissed the usefulness of nuclear weapons. In 1947, he told a Wisconsin Republican, Governor Harold Strassen, that the atomic bomb was not “as serious a force as certain politicians are inclined to regard it.” America’s monopoly on the technology, he insisted, was the only problem.Stalin said atomic bombs were “intended for intimidating weak nerves, but they cannot decide the outcome of war,” although they had done just that in Japan. In 1993’s “Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics,” the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union, Vyacheslav Molotov, pulled back the Iron Curtain.“Our fundamental task,” Molotov said, “was to expand the positions of socialism. We had to hold on until we had our own atomic bomb, and then we could speak in a completely different language.” When the USSR split the atom in 1949, they switched from advocating abolition to nuclear belligerence.On Monday, the Arizona Democrat turned independent, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, said on Fox News that Beijing “has done an incredible job of spreading misinformation and disinformation across our country” regarding AI. “People think, ‘Gosh AI is scary’” the former senator said, and costs jobs, but “industries have experienced wage growth and job growth.”Wednesday on the Senate floor, the Republican of Kentucky, Senator Rand Paul, said that “as with new technology, there are going to be some challenges.” He said it’s “important that the development of AI is carried out in a responsible, thoughtful manner.” Yet he added that “if Congress acts hastily,” it “risks killing innovation and setting this technology back decades.”Communist China, like the USSR, knows that it can’t move with the same speed as American innovators. As Beijing tries to catch up in the AI race, the communist regime will seek to hobble the competition with fear — and, once they achieve parity or surge ahead, they’ll start speaking in language far less accommodating than Mr. Xi is likely to use with Mr. Trump next week.

Communist China, Seeking To Erase America’s Lead in AI, Takes a Page From Soviet Union’s Atomic Playbook

Communist China, Seeking To Erase America’s Lead in AI, Takes a Page From Soviet Union’s Atomic Playbook

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