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Assessing U.S. competitiveness in AI using crowdsourced forecasting

Author
INFER Team
Published
Mar 25, 2022 04:12PM UTC
From self-driving cars to cures for cancer to autonomous weapons systems, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are already changing the ways in which we interact with each other and the world. Because artificial intelligence is a cornerstone of advances in so many fields, maintaining technological leadership is key to both economic and geopolitical competition.

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:
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