The Global Realities of Failing to Protect American Technology Leadership

As we move closer to the 2020 presidential election, the time has come for a candid conversation about the dangers of failing to protect America’s technology leadership in an increasingly competitive and hostile world. Let’s look at five areas where evolving social and political attitudes are damaging America’s global competitive position.

Artificial Intelligence. Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) based on the idea that systems can learn from data, identify patterns and make decisions with minimal human intervention. In effect, it’s a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building, or algorithms. Data doesn’t need to be categorized or tagged by humans to be analyzed. The AI machines look at vast quantities of raw data and figures out what to make of it. The more data the AIs analyze, the smarter they become.

Data is the fuel that drives machine learning. At the very time that data is growing in importance, Europe and the U.S. are clamping down on the use of personally identifiable information and medical data for privacy reasons. China is taking the opposite position where the state has access to all information needed to facilitate state goals. One of those goals is global leadership in artificial intelligence. As Kai-Fu Lee, the founder and chief executive of Beijing-based Sinovation Ventures, says, “Data is the new oil. China is the new Saudi Arabia.” I’m not advocating misuse of personal data. But if America wants to remain competitive in artificial intelligence—and in the many advances it can deliver—we must find a way to exchange our paranoia about misuse of personal data for enthusiasm about proper and controlled use of sanitized or properly authorized datasets.

Facial Recognition. Powered in part by AI, facial recognition technology is advancing rapidly. (Think about recent improvements in Alexa-like voice recognition, but on steroids.) In China, it’s a key part of the government’s social credit score system designed to “allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” With a positive “social” score, a Chinese citizen can gain priority hospital access and travel with relative ease. With a poor (troublemaker) score, the person may be unable to buy a train ticket or even access an ATM. While the system integrates huge quantities of data, facial recognition provides the tracking as people go about their daily lives. Ask the Uighurs. Because of the huge government market, Chinese companies lead the world in this technology. By contrast, in the U.S. tech company employees, police unions, and city councils are rallying against virtually any use of facial recognition, even public testing to train the algorithms.  The principal arguments against the technology are invasion of privacy and potential racial bias by the algorithms. Both are justifiable concerns that can be carried to extremes. My favorite is that it’s OK for a police officer with eyeglasses and deep fatigue from a late shift to personally identify a suspect from a book of known criminals, but it’s not OK for facial recognition to do the screening. Like security cameras, the technology is out there. China is already supplying its technology to police departments and militaries around the world. Pretending America can be the ostrich is an ineffective strategy. The less we train the algorithms, the greater the risk that poor technology will result in bias and American companies will be locked out of this market.

Tech Company Dominance. Americans believe that our major tech companies lead the world in what they do. Politicians on both sides of the aisle want to counter that dominance by increasing regulations over social media and the internet. Some want to break up our leading tech companies before they become even more dominant and do even more damage. While these may be politically popular ideas, and some regulation may well be necessary, destroying the dominance of America’s leading tech companies would be a disaster for our global leadership in technology. We are part of a global economy that is driven by technology. Thanks to U.S. dominance, European companies have largely been left out of the software and internet revolution. If we shatter our leading tech companies, we may join Europe in watching China dominate the world in tech. Although we don’t notice in the U.S., Chinese companies like Alibaba are already miles ahead in integrating social media, payments and online retailing. Huawei is threatening world leadership in 5G. We may need to constrain some of the problematic business practices of our dominant tech companies, but the solutions cannot denigrate them to second tier status against their international competitors.

Military Technology. For decades, American industry has provided the research, technology and tooling needed to power our military. Today, employees from some leading U.S. businesses are demanding that their companies refuse to support military programs or research. In some cases, the companies have complied. While this may seem socially or politically correct to some, this action must also be judged in a global context. Companies in Russia and China will not—indeed, dare not—take such a position. The fallout here raises difficult questions. If our leading tech companies refuse to do work for the American military, where will this leave America on the global stage? Looking for second class tech from foreign sources? And are we prepared to have some group of self-appointed tech employees decide what’s best for the country?

Medical Technology. AI offers special potential in medicine. As noted above, access to big data is the key. Despite the still-early implementation of electronic medical records, we have barely scratched the surface in amalgamating and analyzing the huge quantities of medical data available to us nationally. Part of the problem is lack of government incentives to undertake this work. But it’s also a political and public relations quagmire. Note the immediate negative reaction to Google’s Nightingale health data initiative with Ascension, the second-largest health system in the U.S. Adding genetic data to the big data mix would dramatically improve the potential results—and further exacerbate the social and political fears. The privacy concerns are real, as are worries about providing unfair financial and intellectual property benefits to the companies undertaking the analyses. But if we fail to advance our medical data analytics, we will not only continue to waste vast sums on the “practice” of medicine by doctors and staff who lack proper science, we will squander our medical excellence and open the door to healthcare and pharmaceutical advances by our global competitors. Given our many other priorities, we literally cannot afford to allow medicine to be excluded from the remarkable advances being driven by AI-enhanced big data analysis in other industries. We put IoT sensors in jet engines and factory machinery, measure everything 24-7 and let the AIs tell us what will fail when. Where is the social pressure and political will to do that with our most precious human asset called life?

Each of these five areas suffers from our parochial, “America-centric” point of view. We look at the problems and argue about solutions without thinking about how they affect our global competitive position. Politicians lash out with attacks on our big technology companies that catch headlines and appeal to their base. Activists focus social media on the allegedly horrific effects and the traditional media piles on. Talking about America’s competitiveness in the world is out of style on the right and the left. We are looking inwardly. Campaign slogans aside, we are gravitating from supremacy and exceptionalism to mediocrity.

We need to remember the rest of the world is moving forward. Whatever we decide to do, let’s do it with that in mind.