At Wander cafe in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter, someone at the next table is listening to Sean Gourley while he is being interviewed about artificial intelligence.
After eavesdropping on the chat they get up, walk over to Gourley’s table and tell him how scared they are.
Welcome to Gourley’s world. Gourley says most people think there is a 1% chance of war between China and the United States, but in his universe it is looking more like 50%.
US defence and intelligence clients account for a large portion of the business Gourley’s San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) company, PrimerAI, does – and right now business is booming.
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“It’s going to happen faster than we think. You’ve got [Chinese Premier] Xi, he’s got the will and the power and the space.
“And I think by all accounts [in] US intelligence assessments, I would concur with them, 2027 seems to be a kind of a timeframe – so that gives us five years.”
Five years to prepare for war.
And a lot can happen in five years. A McKinsey global survey released this year reveals AI usage has more than doubled amongst businesses globally in the five years since 2017.
Even companies like John Deere have got in on the act. The 185-year-old firm is not exactly a cool Silicon Valley startup, but it has committed itself to creating fully autonomous farming systems by 2030, and it has already unveiled its first autonomous tractor, the 8R.
Domestically Fonterra too has started investing in artificial intelligence, most recently by forming a partnership with Dutch AI firm Connecterra.
Gourley says New Zealand often thinks of itself as a country hidden at the edges of the world, but if a war between the United States and China ever takes off then we won’t be at the edge of the world any more – we’ll be at the edge of the theatre of conflict.
And it will be the world’s first war between two AI superpowers.
Christchurch-born Gourley is a Rhodes scholar, did his PhD at Oxford on the mathematics of war, started Primer in 2015 and is now helping the United States prepare for a future war with China in the artificial intelligence space.
The idea of an AI war might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but conflict is not so far off if you believe an AI-enabled war is currently taking place on our TV screens.
Gourley says examples are being found of “loitering munitions” on the Ukrainian battlefield, autonomous drones trained to loiter in an area until they spot something that looks like an enemy military asset, then strike with no human decision-making involved.
Artificial Intelligence has been gaining more prominence in recent months, especially after the release of recent pieces of technology that allow people to chat with AI and coach them into creating art.
Gourley says AIs are currently capable of generating essays to an A- grade at university and in a matter of months they will have advanced further still.
The pace is increasing so fast because these machines are learning from one another as they process data at light speed.
Director of the University of Waikato’s Te Ipu o te Mahara AI Institute Albert Biffet doesn’t want to weigh in on issues around a potential artificial intelligence war, but says he does see significant issues around national sovereignty and power ahead when it comes to AI.
Biffet and other AI scientists authored a white paper – “Aotearoa New Zealand Artificial Intelligence: A Strategic Approach” – imploring the Government to invest in artificial intelligence research so that the country is not left wholly reliant on algorithms created by other countries.
He says artificial intelligence will create such major efficiency advantages in the future that New Zealand could end up held hostage to overseas creators of it much like we rely on overseas-produced commodities like oil today.
The problem is creating AI will become a valuable asset not all countries will have access to.
Biffet says if we do not undertake high-skilled AI research in New Zealand then we will lose the best researchers to other countries, further depleting our ability to adapt in the future. This outcome would be quite a fall from grace from the nation whose universities created foundational AI tools like R and Weka that are used by AI-enthusiasts throughout the world.
But in the future some countries will possess the ability to create advanced AI, while others will be stuck wholly reliant on using the AIs others create, and this has implications for national sovereignty – and Biffet says New Zealand may well end up in the latter camp.
Gourley sees more opportunities for New Zealand on the engineering side of artificial intelligence rather than leading research around it.
He says we cannot match the computing power and investment heft of large US technology companies, or the Chinese government, but he thinks there is a lot of engineering work we can do around AI.
Gourley believes New Zealand could do well by engineering AI into different products, including products for warfare like autonomous sailing bots to police the world’s fourth-largest exclusive economic zone.
All of this establishes why AI may well be a major economic force in the coming years, but why does Gourley also think there is such a high possibility of a war between the United States and China?
Because throughout history the emerging global power ends up in a conflict with the dominant power 80% of the time as they rise.
As the emerging power rises they try to grab hold of “offsets” that allow them to counter the military advantage the existing superpower has.
Gourley says China is trying to acquire artificial intelligence technology to offset US military hardware, so in the case of a future conflict over Taiwan the United States will be confronted by a swarm of autonomous amphibious drones rather than a manned carrier group.
However, a future AI conflict might not involve weapons at all, instead the primary tool may well be information.
Gourley thinks it is telling that the first pieces of infrastructure destroyed during the war in Ukraine were the tools used to distribute information.
In a future AI-enabled conflict the war may well be won by convincing the other side not to resist or get involved.
Successful algorithms might enable a nation state to create hundreds of thousands of social media accounts and posts at the drop of a hat to do things like convince the Taiwanese that they really are a part of China, or to persuade New Zealanders they really shouldn’t be bothered with what is going on in the South China Sea.
Then you have got the wildcard of the TikTok social media platform, which will present more opportunities for information warfare. TikTok is controlled by Chinese company ByteDance, fast becoming the dominant social media platform amongst Generation Z in the West. As Gourley puts it: at no other time has the rising power controlled so much of the information flow into the dominant power.
Which brings up another point, what exactly are these AI? Are they machines that can think for themselves?
Biffet sums contemporary AI as basically consisting of three components: data, computing power and algorithms.
Data is fed into an algorithm, the computing power allows the machine to test its assessments against real world data at high speed. As the machine does this it begins to “learn” and eventually you are left with a high-powered algorithm that can do a lot of things on its own.
Gourley says this is where China has an advantage in terms of training the AI of the future. China is able to use some of its large labour force for “labelling”, effectively providing human feedback on the various assessments these machines make as they learn and converting real world experiences into an AI can process.
“An estimated 3+ million people in China do data labelling, the biggest company has 300,000 people that do data labelling – [telling a computer that] when you see this image it’s a chocolate, when you see this image it’s milk.”
But these AI are not conscious in the sense that they can think for themselves.
They are essentially high-powered equations which have the power to change some of their parameters so that they become more accurate at whatever it is they were originally programmed to do.
Taiwan will be an important player for any nation state seeking to gain AI superiority because only Taiwan produces the chips at scale that are needed to power the most advanced AI.
China will need advanced computer chips to power its artificial intelligence algorithms, but will have to import the vast majority of these chips are from Taiwan.
So Gourley says China will extract great value from taking over Taiwan and its chip-manufacturing plants – if it can pull such an invasion off.
Where does this leave New Zealand? Gourley says while war is not inevitable, and he does not believe we should antagonise China, we will have to prepare for the very real possibility a war will take place: and that could well mean picking a side.
“New Zealand has an opportunity to re-engage with Australia with the United States, with Japan, with India.
‘We’ve wanted to play a fairly middle line: don’t annoy China, keep the exports … [but] we’re going to have a choice: do we want to be neutral? And what does neutrality really mean? Can Germany be neutral about Ukraine?
“Or, we’re going to have to pick a side.”
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