WASHINGTON—Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael said Tuesday at Breitbart News’s latest policy event that whoever wins the AI Race, the United States or China, will dominate economically and militarily.
During Breitbart News’s “AI is Here: What to Fear, What to Embrace,” Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle asked Michael what would happen if the United States loses the AI race to China, and what the stakes would be for Western civilization as a whole. Michael said that whoever emerges as the victor in the AI race will lead economically.
“If you think about the 20th century, the way I’ve described this is we had military power leading up through World War II, and that created sort of… peace besides the Cold War, and then that led to our technological dominance. The internet started here. The internet economy started here. The iPhone, the app economy started here, and… that led to our sort of economic dominance… military technology economy,” he said. “Now, in the 21st century, I think technological dominance will determine whether we are economically dominant and militarily dominant. It stems from the tech dominance.”
“If AI is the central, newest, and most important new technology, if we’re not dominant in that, it threatens our military and economic dominance, and it’s just a different flow in the 21st century,” he added. “And whoever wins that technological race, I think, is going to be [sic] economically, and that means the dollar is the reserve currency. That means priceable are priced in dollars. That means American bonds are the kind of thing that people invest in for safety. That means we have much more control of the financial system and… can ensure that it’s used for good.”
“So I think,” Michael asked, “do you want the Chinese model or the American model in the 21st century? And that starts for who’s going to be dominant in technology.”
Taylor Budowich, the founder of Innovation Council Action Inc. and former White House deputy chief of staff, told Boyle in an earlier conversation at the event that allowing China to win the AI race is “not an option.”
“Losing is not an option on this… We have spent decades — going back to the manufacturing — hollowing out American manufacturing and outsourcing it to countries like China. If we outsource innovation, and that’s really what, at the end of the day, AI is and will lead to, we will be beholden to China militarily, culturally. You look at these models. I mean, look — if China is the one that gets to decide what the answer to your prompt is, we should be concerned,” he said. “And so you know, being reliant on China when it comes to AI — losing is not an option. But it goes back to: How do we win? How do we win is to put the power in the hands of everyday people, put the money into the communities, build these communities back up, and empower them. I think that’s what AI is doing.”
“You see the power of AI, how it affects the average person… I mean, one of the things that it’s doing is it’s crunching down R&D, the research. Research and development only takes a certain amount of people. It’s the manufacturing that takes — it’s the building the product that you then develop — that takes a lot of jobs. And what we don’t know is the next thing that we’re inventing. We are going to continue, like we have throughout history, to invent things, but the research and the time to develop new things is being cut down,” he added.
Budowich added that someone does not “need a degree from Yale anymore to really create business efficiencies.”
“You don’t need this fancy education that people get. The average person, the person that has been working… their ass off for many years, that know that there’s a problem, they just haven’t figured out how to solve it yet, AI allows them to do that,” he said. “And I think you’re going to see a lot of people having tremendous success that you otherwise wouldn’t. It is a tremendous democratization of power and intellect.”