China’s Intelligent Weaponry Gets Smarter
China’s Intelligent Weaponry Gets Smarter
By JOHN MARKOFF and MATTHEW ROSENBERG FEB. 3, 2017
Robert O. Work, the veteran defense official retained as
deputy secretary by President Trump, calls them his “A.I. dudes.” The breezy moniker
belies their serious task: The dudes have been a kitchen cabinet of sorts, and
have advised Mr. Work as he has sought to reshape warfare by bringing
artificial intelligence to the battlefield.
Last spring, he asked, “O.K., you guys are the smartest
guys in A.I., right?”
No, the dudes told him, “the smartest guys are at
Facebook and Google,” Mr. Work recalled in an interview.
Now, increasingly, they’re also in China. The United
States no longer has a strategic monopoly on the technology, which is widely
seen as the key factor in the next generation of warfare.
The Pentagon’s plan to bring A.I. to the military is
taking shape as Chinese researchers assert themselves in the nascent technology
field. And that shift is reflected in surprising commercial advances in
artificial intelligence among Chinese companies.
Last year, for example, Microsoft researchers proclaimed
that the company had created software capable of matching human skills in
understanding speech.
Although they boasted that they had outperformed their
United States competitors, a well-known A.I. researcher who leads a Silicon
Valley laboratory for the Chinese web services company Baidu gently taunted
Microsoft, noting that Baidu had achieved similar accuracy with the Chinese
language two years earlier.
That, in a nutshell, is the challenge the United States
faces as it embarks on a new military strategy founded on the assumption of its
continued superiority in technologies such as robotics and artificial
intelligence.
First announced last year by Ashton B. Carter, President
Barack Obama’s defense secretary, the “Third Offset” strategy provides a
formula for maintaining a military advantage in the face of a renewed rivalry
with China and Russia.
Well into the 1960s, the United States held a military
advantage based on technological leadership in nuclear weapons. In the 1970s,
that perceived lead shifted to smart weapons, based on brand-new Silicon Valley
technologies like computer chips. Now, the nation’s leaders plan on retaining
that military advantage with a significant commitment to artificial
intelligence and robotic weapons.
But the global technology balance of power is shifting.
From the 1950s through the 1980s, the United States carefully guarded its
advantage. It led the world in computer and material science technology, and it
jealously hoarded its leadership with military secrecy and export controls.
In the late 1980s, the emergence of the inexpensive and
universally available microchip upended the Pentagon’s ability to control
technological progress. Now, rather than trickling down from military and
advanced corporate laboratories, today’s new technologies increasingly come
from consumer electronics firms. Put simply, the companies that make the
fastest computers are the same ones that put things under our Christmas trees.
As consumer electronics manufacturing has moved to Asia,
both Chinese companies and the nation’s government laboratories are making
major investments in artificial intelligence.
The advance of the Chinese was underscored last month
when Qi Lu, a veteran Microsoft artificial intelligence specialist, left the
company to become chief operating officer at Baidu, where he will oversee the
company’s ambitious plan to become a global leader in A.I.
And last year, Tencent, developer of the mobile app
WeChat, a Facebook competitor, created an artificial intelligence research
laboratory and began investing in United States-based A.I. companies.
Rapid Chinese progress has touched off a debate in the
United States between military strategists and technologists over whether the
Chinese are merely imitating advances or are engaged in independent innovation
that will soon overtake the United States in the field.
“The Chinese leadership
is increasingly thinking about how to ensure they are competitive in the next
wave of technologies,” said Adam Segal, a specialist in emerging technologies
and national security at the Council on Foreign Relations.
In August, the state-run China Daily reported that the
country had embarked on the development of a cruise missile system with a “high
level” of artificial intelligence. The new system appears to be a response to a
missile the United States Navy is expected to deploy in 2018 to counter growing
Chinese military influence in the Pacific.
Known as the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, or L.R.A.S.M.,
it is described as a “semiautonomous” weapon. According to the Pentagon, this
means that though targets are chosen by human soldiers, the missile uses artificial
intelligence technology to avoid defenses and make final targeting decisions.
The new Chinese weapon typifies a strategy known as
“remote warfare,” said John Arquilla, a military strategist at the Naval Post
Graduate School in Monterey, Calif. The idea is to build large fleets of small
ships that deploy missiles, to attack an enemy with larger ships, like aircraft
carriers.
“They are making their
machines more creative,” he said. “A little bit of automation gives the
machines a tremendous boost.”
Whether or not the Chinese will quickly catch the United
States in artificial intelligence and robotics technologies is a matter of
intense discussion and disagreement in the United States.
Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu, said the United
States may be too myopic and self-confident to understand the speed of the
Chinese competition.
“There are many
occasions of something being simultaneously invented in China and elsewhere, or
being invented first in China and then later making it overseas,” he said. “But
then U.S. media reports only on the U.S. version. This leads to a misperception
of those ideas having been first invented in the U.S.”
A key example of Chinese progress that goes largely
unreported in the United States is Iflytek, an artificial intelligence company
that has focused on speech recognition and understanding natural language. The
company has won international competitions both in speech synthesis and in
translation between Chinese and English-language texts.
The company, which Chinese technologists said has a close
relationship with the government for development of surveillance technology,
said it is working with the Ministry of Science and Technology on a “Humanoid
Answering Robot.”
“Our goal is to send
the machine to attend the college entrance examination, and to be admitted by
key national universities in the near future,” said Qingfeng Liu, Iflytek’s
chief executive.
The speed of the Chinese technologists, compared to
United States and European artificial intelligence developers, is noteworthy.
Last April, Gansha Wu, then the director of Intel’s laboratory in China, left
his post and began assembling a team of researchers from Intel and Google to
build a self-driving car company. Last month, the company, Uisee Technology,
met its goal — taking a demonstration to the International Consumer Electronics
Show in Las Vegas — after just nine months of work.
“The A.I.
technologies, including machine vision, sensor fusion, planning and control, on
our car are completely home-brewed,” Mr. Wu said. “We wrote every line by
ourselves.”
Their first vehicle is intended for controlled
environments like college and corporate campuses, with the ultimate goal of
designing a shared fleet of autonomous taxis.
The United States’ view of China’s advance may be
starting to change. Last October, a White House report on artificial
intelligence included several footnotes suggesting that China is now publishing
more research than scholars here.
Still, some scientists say the quantity of academic
papers does not tell us much about innovation. And there are indications that
China has only recently begun to make A.I. a priority in its military systems.
“I think while China
is definitely making progress in A.I. systems, it is nowhere close to matching
the U.S.,” said Abhijit Singh, a former Indian military officer who is now a
naval weapons analyst at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.
Chinese researchers who are directly involved in
artificial intelligence work in China have a very different view.
“It is indisputable
that Chinese authors are a significant force in A.I., and their position has
been increasing drastically in the past five years,” said Kai-Fu Lee, a
Taiwanese-born artificial intelligence researcher who played a key role in
establishing both Microsoft’s and Google’s China-based research laboratories.
Mr. Lee, now a venture capitalist who invests in both
China and the United States, acknowledged that the United States is still the
global leader but believes that the gap has drastically narrowed. His firm,
Sinovation Ventures, has recently raised $675 million to invest in A.I. both in
the United States and in China.
“Using a chess
analogy,” he said, “we might say that grandmasters are still largely North
American, but Chinese occupy increasingly greater portions of the master-level
A.I. scientists.”
What is not in dispute is that the close ties between
Silicon Valley and China both in terms of investment and research, and the open
nature of much of the American A.I. research community, has made the most
advanced technology easily available to China.
In addition to setting up research outposts such as
Baidu’s Silicon Valley A.I. Laboratory, Chinese citizens, including government
employees, routinely audit Stanford University artificial intelligence courses.
One Stanford professor, Richard Socher, said it was easy
to spot the Chinese nationals because after the first few weeks, his students
would often skip class, choosing instead to view videos of the lectures. The
Chinese auditors, on the other hand, would continue to attend, taking their
seats at the front of the classroom.
Artificial intelligence is only one part of the tech
frontier where China is advancing rapidly.
Last year, China also brought the world’s fastest
supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight, online, supplanting another Chinese model
that had been the world’s fastest. The new supercomputer is thought to be part
of a broader Chinese push to begin driving innovation, a shift from its role as
a manufacturing hub for components and devices designed in the United States and
elsewhere.
In a reflection of the desire to become a center of
innovation, the processors in the new computer are of a native Chinese design.
The earlier supercomputer, the Tianhe 2, was powered by Intel’s Xeon
processors; after it came online, the United States banned further export of
the chips to China, in hopes of limiting the Chinese push into supercomputing.
The new supercomputer, like similar machines anywhere in
the world, has a variety of uses, and does not by itself represent a direct
military challenge. It can be used to model climate change situations, for
instance, or to perform analysis of large data sets.
But similar advances in high-performance computing being
made by the Chinese could be used to push ahead with machine-learning research,
which would have military applications, along with more typical defense
functions, such as simulating nuclear weapons tests or breaking the encryption
used by adversaries.
Moreover, while there appear to be relatively cozy
relationships between the Chinese government and commercial technology efforts,
the same cannot be said about the United States. The Pentagon recently
restarted its beachhead in Silicon Valley, known as the Defense Innovation Unit
Experimental facility, or DIUx. It is an attempt to rethink bureaucratic United
States government contracting practices in terms of the faster and more fluid
style of Silicon Valley.
The government has not yet undone the damage to its
relationship with the Valley brought about by Edward J. Snowden’s revelations
about the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices. Many Silicon
Valley firms remain hesitant to be seen as working too closely with the
Pentagon out of fear of losing access to China’s market.
“There are smaller
companies, the companies who sort of decided that they’re going to be in the
defense business, like a Palantir,” said Peter W. Singer, an expert in the
future of war at New America, a think tank in Washington, referring to the Palo
Alto, Calif., start-up founded in part by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
“But if you’re thinking about the big, iconic tech companies, they can’t become
defense contractors and still expect to get access to the Chinese market.”
Those concerns are real for Silicon Valley.
“No one sort of
overtly says that, because the Pentagon can’t say it’s about China, and the
tech companies can’t,” Mr. Singer said. “But it’s there in the background.”
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