Although the U.S. has traditionally been a leader in both AI and machine learning, China and others are working to become the dominant player in AI globally. INFER is using crowdsourced forecasting to shed light on whether the U.S. will retain its competitive advantage in AI.
But what signals should we be forecasting to understand how the U.S. will be projected to perform in the future? We recently wrote about an approach we call “strategic question decomposition” which seeks to identify contributing factors and forecastable signals to quantify our forecast. Using the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence’s 2021 Report to inform our decomposition, we identified the following contributing factors which we are using to develop forecast questions:
- Strategy: What are the strategies the U.S. and its competitors are using to reach the cutting edge of AI developments and shape the international system that governs AI use.
- Talent: Who is attracting, retaining, and developing the people needed to be at the forefront of advances in AI.
- Innovation: What benchmarks will AI research achieve, and what AI applications are being developed by various countries, as well as investments in AI research and AI infrastructure.
- Intellectual and Technology Protections: What is the extent and effectiveness of efforts of the U.S. and its competitors to protect both intellectual property related to AI as well as the technologies themselves?
- Microelectronics: What is the extent to which the U.S. can regain and retain a two-generation lead in microelectronic technology?
- Associated Technologies: Who will be competitive in the technologies that make AI possible such as quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, robotics, and biotechnology?
You can find all published questions on AI competitiveness at INFER’s U.S. Competitiveness in AI topic area, and you can suggest questions about AI competitiveness in the Question Lab.
Want to know more about the policy debates that INFER outputs could help inform? Check out these additional resources:
- How Artificial Intelligence is Changing the World (Brookings)
- Artificial Intelligence (Future of Life Institute)
- Artificial Intelligence is Now Everywhere (Popular Science)
- Maintaining the Competitive Advantage in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (RAND)
- National Power After AI (CSET)
- AI and Synthetic Biology Are Critical to Future US Competitiveness (War on the Rocks)
- US Leadership in AI Is Still Possible (CFR)
- Europe and AI: Leading, Lagging Behind, or Carving its Own Way (Carnegie Endowment for Peace)
- How the U.S. can dominate in the race to national AI Supremacy (Brookings)
- Is China Emerging as the Global Leader in AI? (HBR)
- China-US Competition in AI: Destabilizing and Intensifying (IISS)