Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Paul Scharre (review)

Reimagining Democracy’s Defense Divya Siddarth (bio) Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. By Paul Scharre. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2023. 496 pp. It seems that we are in the throes of an AI arms race. A recent open letter calling for a pause in artificial-intelligence research, with signatories from Elon Musk to Yoshua Bengio, states that “AI labs [are] locked in an outof-control race to develop and deploy AI” that they cannot “understand, predict, or reliably control.” Responses to the letter included exhortations from U.S. senators and CEOs for the United States to instead “step up” its AI arms race against China for fear of being left behind, safety risks from corporate competition notwithstanding. Paul Scharre, a vice-president and director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, takes the latter position, although he carefully sidesteps using the term “arms race.” In his comprehensive Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Scharre makes the case that the United States is locked in a “race . . . to lead in AI and write the rules of the next century to control the future of global power and security” (p. 8). While the United States is currently in a favorable position, the stakes are too high and the outcome too uncertain for complacency. Scharre calls for a renewed program of AI investment, innovation, and diffusion to cement a U.S. lead. Of course, races to control technology among rival powers are nothing new. The sixteenth century B.C.E. saw the first use of the chariot as a weapon, altering the balance of power in Egypt’s favor and sparking a centuries-long arms race from Anatolia to Mesopotamia. The Roman [End Page 173] ballista, itself derived from earlier Greek designs, set off its own race among rival states in the ancient world. The modern era has seen its share of such races, each more destructive, from the Anglo-German naval arms race, which contributed to the tensions that sparked World War I, to the destruction unleashed and threatened by the development of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. But as technology becomes more powerful, the consequences of these arms races rise commensurately, as does the risk—increasingly borne not only by combatants, but by the world at large. Nowhere is this clearer than in the race to lead in AI, both on and off the battlefield (but mostly on). Scharre’s focus is on the risk that falling behind on AI would be a death blow to democracy. As Scharre puts it: “If the United States and other democracies do not work together to lead in AI and shape the rules for how it is used, they risk a creeping tide of techno-authoritarianism that undermines democracy and freedom around the globe” (p. 7). This is very much a Biden-era book, framing this global conflict as one between democracies and autocracies that the United States must focus on winning. If there were any doubts as to the purveyors of this techno-authoritarianism, Scharre puts them to bed early, opening the book with quotes from Xi Jinping and Vladmir Putin expressing their own ambitions to dominate in AI. China, in particular, is the target of Scharre’s concern. If China becomes the world’s AI leader by 2030, as is its goal, Scharre foresees a future of widespread surveillance, human-rights abuses, and the erosion of global freedoms. Worryingly, according to Scharre, China may be poised to do just that. The country produces more AI papers than the United States does, collects and can utilize far more data than the privacy-concerned West can, and is on track to spend billions on research, training, and launching large-scale AI projects. If democracies do not propose an alternative model for AI governance, Scharre fears that the speed and scale of China’s action may bulldoze other efforts. Scharre enumerates four battlegrounds on which the future of AI will be decided, each of which is described as a surface area of competition between the United States and China: data, compute (or computing hardware), talent, and institutions. Throughout the book, he ties...