Excellent writing on how to protect against espionage and intellectual property theft from foreign actors. Its developers borrowed from some fundamental features of GPT-3 and machine learning generally (insofar as the quality of its training data — an underappreciated but established aspect of the field — was a priority), while also making modifications that improve its performance and lower computational burdens. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. The four components of AI vary in importance not just in terms of how state-of-the-art AI systems are built over time, but also in terms of how incentivized states are to innovate their way beyond them.

My primary reason for denying a star is that the book provides a somewhat murky definition of what AI is in this context. I recommend Four Battlegrounds for those interested in an accessible breakdown of modern AI’s technical and material underpinnings, its diffusion across the international system and effects on relative national power, and a litany of often-personalized accounts of how efforts to weaponize AI for harmful ends within and across societies are being met with urgent countermeasures. Four Battlegrounds takes readers inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future. The recent Gulf Information Technology Exhibition ( GITEX) hosted in Marrakech, furthermore, highlighted an enthusiasm about AI for the African continent’s development and the improvement of human labor. The book, in many ways, is an invitation to open up regional discussions on AI adoption and relative national power, so long as one considers the technological elephants in the room: the United States and China.Readers knowledgeable about computer science will find it clarifying, while others will gain immense understanding of an often opaque if important subject. China technological decoupling is an unavoidable risk for MENA states, triggering, as Mohammed Soliman observes, “a growing digital divide” between a subregion of Gulf states, North African economies, and the Levant “that exacerbates the challenges of finding a digitally capable workforce. As someone who has been studying this field since 2005, I found the data to be sound and the explanations of the TPU, GPU, and CPU distinctions particularly well done. The fourth “battlefield” is maybe the most critical: the ultimate global leader in AI will have institutions that effectively incorporate AI into their economy, society, and especially their military. It's unlikely to convince any large military to replace its current focus on manpower, ships, tanks, and planes as the main measures of military power.

A very useful introduction to and update on AI in war, Four Battlegrounds is very accessible for people new to the topic.Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point. Scharre does an interesting job reviewing the current state of AI, particularly in the military and political realms. None of this is to exaggerate the hand that open-source AI is dealing to tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Open AI. Divisions in technological capacity and available resources between MENA states are substantial, but already the lens through which Four Battlegrounds presents AI is converging with regional developments. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives―and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, and Europe.

Scharre breaks down technology’s role in global affairs into four “battlegrounds”: data, computing, talent, and institutions.In this way, some MENA states can already act to leverage AI’s four components to their national advantage. The United States currently has the advantage in semiconductor production, chips that are manufactured in Taiwan. My intuition says this is mostly more important than is deploying the AI technology that existed in 2022. Authoritarians have already figured out how to use AI to their maximum advantage, and democrats must urgently do the same or risk losing the contest.

Scharre's patterns here suggest that he's mostly focused on convincing the US to go to war with China.The main idea in the book, represented by the title, explores the four areas Scharre describes where A.