Other states are understandably reluctant to acquiesce to this vision of an America-China AI duopoly. In 2018, the European Union acknowledged that fierce international competition demanded coordinated action for it to remain at the forefront of AI development and announced a joint ‘public-private’ programme aimed to increase investments in AI research and development by at least €20 billion by 2020 (Middleton 2018). A striking demonstration of the centrality of state policy for AI development, and a major reason for European corporations’ anxieties on this score, is the potential impact of the EU’s recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This legislation places limits on corporate data gathering that are stringent by comparison with the policies of the US and China. The GDPR is criticized by business lobbyists for cramping potential ML projects – a disturbing harbinger of the potential for AI-capital to normalize and require regimes of high-surveillance governance. In an attempt to staunch a ‘brain drain’ of AI talent to super-salaried positions with US and Chinese corporations, the EU also launched a multinational European AI institute – the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) – with centres in a number of European countries (Rankin 2018). Beneath this common European front for AI, however, national rivalries continue to roil, with the UK, France and Germany jockeying for position as the regional AI leader (Shead 2018).
The US, China and the EU are merely the largest contenders in a worldwide rush by states to attract AI-capital. Japan and Russia are also substantially subsidizing AI development; by mid-2018 more than 20 nations, ranging from New Zealand to Poland, Kenya and Tunisia, had formulated ‘artificial intelligence strategies’ (Dutton 2018). Deep anxieties underlie such mobilization. As we will see, at the level of individual corporations, AI-capital may tend to favour winner-take-all concentration of ownership and the creation of monopolies. A similar dynamic may emerge at the level of international state relations. One of the more alarming features of Lee’s predictions of a ‘bipolar’ US-China dominance of AI-capital is that ‘while AI-rich countries rake in astounding profits countries that haven’t crossed a certain technological threshold will find themselves slipping backward ... [into] a state of near total dependence and subservience’, frantically ‘trading market and data access’ for the use of AI facilities beyond their control (K-F. Lee 2018: Kindle Loc. 2759). This prospect, along with the yet blunter threat of AI military power, ensures that no state wants to be excluded from developing the emerging general conditions of capitalist production – and destruction.
means of cognition
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