The U.S. is approaching a “critical moment” in the global technology race, and the price of losing could be a world beholden to China, according to a report by defense and technology experts.
“It is going to be the defining feature of global politics for the rest of our lives,” Bob Work, who served as deputy defense secretary in both the Obama and Trump administrations, told reporters Monday. “It is going to determine who is the greatest economic power in the 21st century. It’s going to determine who is the greatest military power. It is a competition that we simply must win.”
The nearly 200-page assessment, called the “Mid-Decade Challenges to National Competitiveness,” is the first published by the Special Competitive Studies Project, a private group led by Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and co-chairman of the U.S government’s National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, and Work, who serves on the group’s board of advisors.
The organization seeks to build on the work completed by the congressionally mandated AI commission, which identified technology as the central element of the rivalry between the U.S. and China. The commission wrapped up its work last October.
