Geopolitics of AI

This article features what does the geopolitics of AI means for Southeast Asia?

Every nation wants to take advantage of technologies like Artificial Intelligence so that the winner can wield significant power in defining and dominating the future economically and geopolitically. In this race, the front runners are the US and China, with both countries surging forward based on their respective competitive advantages: the US has cutting-edge hardware, research, and talent, while China has a massive trove of AI-ready data, which fuels technological development, and a strong political will to succeed. The use of artificial intelligence or AI technologies is growing in Southeast Asia, with governments in the region showing interest in harnessing AI for national development. AI technologies have major implications on human rights, privacy, media, and democracy, and their growing use in the region raises questions on the need to set governance mechanisms and protect people against potential harms and risks. This article features what does the geopolitics of AI means for Southeast Asia?

The strength of these two nations in the tech area without a doubt has vital ramifications on Southeast Asia, which prevalently depends on bringing in and utilizing AI technology from the US and China. In the first of this two-section series, we take a gander at China's and the US' methodologies for attesting strength in the AI and tech space, including the potential dangers that each posture to the world at large.

The ascent of China

A few researchers have depicted Southeast Asia as a proving ground and a door for China's extension as a world superpower. Indeed, China is progressively viewed by Southeast Asians as the most persuasive financial power in the reason and, less significantly, the most compelling strategically and decisively. In ISEAS's 2021 study on the State of Southeast Asia, 76.3% of the 1,032 Southeast Asian respondents considered China to be the most grounded monetary power in the area (rather than 7.4% who picked the US), while 49.1% considered China to be the most persuasive political and vital power in the locale (30.4% picked the US). Respondents who picked China as most persuasive additionally communicated worry about its rising power (72.3% in the economic domain and 88.6% in the political and key domain).

China has a merged long haul system that intends to spread its worldwide impact. As reported by Xi Jinping in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a trillion-dollar global infrastructural program that traverses almost 140 nations, with an extensive portfolio that remembers projects for an assortment of areas like energy, transportation, and data innovation. Political eyewitnesses have noticed that even though China outlines the BRI as a drive for monetary collaboration to prod global turn of events, the BRI likewise brings huge key incentive for China through ports and other transportation infrastructure.5

The US as another option?

The trepidation about China prepares everyone towards the US, the occupant world superpower, which is regularly considered as a more harmless power. Notwithstanding, stresses over the Chinese state's excess apply and cover altogether with the instance of US predominance. Also, the fundamental rationale of American Big Tech carries its image of dangers to social orders around the world.

Discussions on the geopolitical AI risks of China accomplishing worldwide strength in AI frequently paint the power battle between the US and China as a confrontation between a liberal vote-based system and computerized authoritarianism. But this polarity is progressively unsound as the US wears out its standing like a boss of a majority rules government, particularly following four fierce long stretches of the Trump organization that finished in a vicious revolt affected by the president himself. Eyewitnesses overall watched with caution as the enraptured media and online climate made two renditions of reality inside American culture, with two different saw champs to the 2020 official races.