BY LUIZA CH. SAVAGE and NANCY SCOLA
‘We are being outspent. We are being outpaced’: Is America ceding the future of AI to China?
The last time a rival power tried to out-innovate the U.S. and marshaled a whole-of-government approach to doing it, the Soviet Union startled Americans by deploying the first man-made satellite into orbit. The Sputnik surprise in 1957 shook American confidence, galvanized its government and set off a space race culminating with the creation of NASA and the moon landing 50 years ago this month.
上一次美国被竞争对手在创新上试图超越，还是苏联将第一颗人造卫星送入轨道的时候。他们集合了全部政府力量参与，这一做法让美国人大吃一惊。1957年“斯普特尼克号”的成功发射动摇了美国人的信心，刺激了美国政府，并引发了一场太空竞赛，最终以美国国家航空航天局(NASA)的成立和50年前这个时间的登月而告终。
Two years since announcing a national plan to become the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030, China is making progress toward its goal on an unprecedented scale, raising the question of whether America’s laissez-faire approach to technology is enough and whether another Sputnik moment is around the corner, according to interviews for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Global Translations podcast.
中国宣布到2030年成为世界领先的人工智能创新中心的计划已经有两年了，中国正向着它的目标规模空前地进步。根据Politico“全球翻译”播客最新一期的采访，引人深思的是，美国是否还能保持着对技术发展自由放任的态度？另一个“斯普特尼克号时刻” 是不是即将来临？
President Donald Trump in 2018 declared AI a national priority, and Lynne Parker, the White House coordinator on artificial intelligence policy, said America “is a very strong leader” in AI.
2018年，美国总统特朗普宣布将人工智能作为国家重点项目，白宫人工智能政策协调员琳恩·帕克表示，美国在人工智能领域“是一个非常强大的领导者”。
“If you look at industry output, if you look at the leading academic institutions that are leading the way and advancing the state of the art and AI, they’re American industries and they're American academics,” Parker said. “We're clearly producing the most impactful commercial products. And certainly that's not to say that the rest of the world isn't waking up to the great opportunities of AI — but clearly, the United States is in the lead.”
帕克说:“如果你关注一下产业的产出，以及引领和提升人工智能水平的先进学术机构，你就会发现这些产业和学术机构都属于美国。我们显然在生产最具影响力的商业产品。当然，这并不是说世界上其他地方没有意识到人工智能带来了巨大机遇，但显然，美国处于领先地位。”
Meanwhile, Beijing has been pumping billions of dollars into research, supporting startups and retooling its education system from elementary schools to universities — all with an explicit goal of outpacing the U.S.
与此同时，中国政府在科研上已经投入了数十亿美元，支持初创企业，并对从小学到大学的整个教育体系都进行了改进，所有这些都是为了一个明确的目标：超越美国。
Governments around the world are taking notice.
世界各国政府都注意到了这一点。
“Over the last 10 years, there's been a big effort in China to become a world leader in research and in many areas — but one of them being computing — and I've seen computer science departments grow and grow until they are now on a par with departments in the West in terms of what the academics do and where they publish,” Dame Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton and co-author of the U.K. government’s AI strategy, told the podcast.
“在过去的10年中,中国为了成为科研领域的世界领导者而在很多学科中付出了巨大努力，但其中一个是计算机科学——我看到他们的计算机科学不断地增大,直到现在，他们在学者研究的问题和发表论文的期刊水平上都已经可以和西方媲美, ”南安普顿大学的计算机科学教授温迪·霍尔对播客说，她同时也是英国政府人工智能战略的合著者。
The Chinese effort extends to regional and local governments, too. “The city of Tianjin alone plans to spend $16 billion on AI — and the U.S. government investment still totals several billion and counting. That’s still lower by an order of magnitude,” said Elsa Kania, an adjunct fellow with the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.
中国的努力也扩展到了地区和地方政府。“仅天津市就计划在人工智能方面投入160亿美元，美国政府的投资总额虽仍然保持在数十亿美元，但这个数字还是要比中国低一个数量级。”新美国安全中心技术和国家安全项目的助理研究员艾尔莎·卡尼亚说。
By her count, some 26 AI plans and policies have cropped up across 19 provinces and regions in China. “These tens of billions in local government spending far outshadows anything any city or state government in the U.S. is doing,” she said.
据她统计，大约有26项人工智能计划和政策遍布中国19个省和地区。她说:“地方政府数百亿美元的开支远远超过美国任何一个城市或州的政府开支。”
Like the Soviet Sputnik, President Xi Jinping’s emphasis on AI as part of his “China Dream” has a military aspect to it as well.
中国国家主席强调人工智能是“中国梦”的一部分。与苏联的人造卫星一样，发展人工智能也有其军事意义。
“It's clear that AI has become an element of U.S.-China military competition and that the Chinese military sees this pursuit of intelligentization — or trying to leverage AI to enhance its military capabilities — as critical to achieving an advantage, perhaps even surpassing the U.S.,” said Kania, who studies Chinese military innovation.
“很明显，人工智能已经成为中美军事实力比拼的要素之一，中方意识到了追求智能化，或是利用人工智能增强军事能力，对于取得优势而言至关重要，甚至可能因此超过美国。”研究中国军事创新的卡尼亚说。
Under pressure to compete on the AI front, the Trump administration last May issued an executive order that calls on the U.S. to improve research and development and come up with plans to maintain supremacy in innovation. “It's a multi-pronged approach that addresses a lot of areas such as AI R&D, making data more available, making computational resources more available, looking at education and workforce issues, AI governance issues, issues of technical standards and also issues of international engagement,” Parker said.
迫于人工智能领域竞争的压力，特朗普政府去年5月发布了一项行政命令，呼吁美国加强研发，并制定出稳固创新优势的计划。帕克说:“这涉及到了很多领域，需要多管齐下，包括人工智能研发、数据采集、计算资源利用、教育和劳动问题、人工智能治理问题、技术标准问题以及国际参与问题。”
But critics worry it’s not nearly enough.
但批评者担心这远远不够。
“We are being outspent. We are being out-researched. We are being outpaced. We are being out-staffed,” said Amy Webb, a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business who specializes in future forecasting. “We have failed and are continuing to fail to see China as a militaristic, economic, and diplomatic pacing threat when it comes to AI.”
“我们的投资、研究、发展速度和人力资源都在被超越。”纽约大学斯特恩商学院专门研究未来前景的教授艾米·韦伯说。“在人工智能方面，我们已经失败了，而且会将继续失败。在人工智能问题上，中国在军事、经济和外交上的威胁都会步步紧逼。”
Xi “sees artificial intelligence as an integral point in shifting geopolitics and geo-economics,” Webb said. China is spending 9 percent of its government budget on R&D — three times the U.S. level, she said. Meanwhile, in Washington, “there is a small group of people, they are having meetings and I have been to some of those meetings. And there is just no sense of urgency,” she said.
中国领导人“认为人工智能是改变地缘政治和地缘经济格局的关键点，”韦伯说。中国的研发支出占政府预算的9%，这个比例是美国的三倍。与此同时，在华盛顿，“有一小群人正在开会，我也参加了其中一些会议，根本就没有紧迫感，” 她说。
The rivalry is unfolding in tandem with Trump’s trade war with Beijing — which is itself, in part, an effort to force China to end forced technology transfers that have helped accelerate Chinese technological progress. And at stake are not only technological bragging rights, but military supremacy and control of technologies that can be used for authoritarian social control, according to interviews in the Global Translations podcast.
特朗普与中国之间的贸易战与AI领域的竞争同时展开。贸易战本身在一定程度上也是为了让中国不再强迫技术转让，这些技术转让加速了中国自身的技术进步。根据全球翻译播客的采访，技术不仅仅是一个面子问题，还关系到军事霸权，并有可能被用于社会控制领域。
Critics like Webb say the U.S. market-based approach depends too much on the private sector.
韦伯及其他批评人士说，美国以市场为基础的做法过于依赖私营部门。
“The problem with relying on the private sector and specifically companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, IBM and Microsoft is that these are publicly traded companies. They have to turn a profit. So we've really put ourselves in kind of a preventable and also dangerous situation,” she said.
“依赖私营部门，特别是像谷歌、亚马逊、Facebook、苹果、IBM和微软这样的公司的问题在于，这些公司都是上市公司，而他们必须盈利。因此我们会把自己置于一种既可掌控但又危险的境地。”她说。
But the sheer scale of China’s brute-force effort should not be confused with results, cautions Parker. “The downside to having a centralized focused approach is that you get very quickly to an end goal that may be the wrong goal. The advantage of the American innovation ecosystem is that we allow many good ideas to be explored in depth and we can see which ones are going to be fruitful,” she said.
但是帕克警告说，中国全力投入的做法不一定能得到同等的效果。她说：“集中火力这一方法的缺点是，你很快就会达到最终目标，但这个目标可能却是错误的。美国创新生态系统的优势在于，我们对许多好的创意进行深入探索，并且可以发现哪些创意将会富有成果。”
When the Soviets launched Sputnik, Washington vowed to never be surprised again — and the following year stood up DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The new agency was focused on long-term, game-changing research and funded projects that led to breakthroughs such as the internet, GPS, early self-driving cars and the beginnings of AI.
当苏联发射第一颗人造地球卫星时，华盛顿发誓再也不会让这种意外情况发生。第二年，国防高级研究计划局(DARPA)成立了。这个新机构专注于可以改变游戏格局的长线研究，并资助了一些项目，这些项目带来了互联网、GPS、早期自动驾驶汽车和人工智能的开端等突破性进展。
In 2018, the agency announced it was investing $2 billion on AI-related research over five years. While that’s a fraction of Chinese investment, John Everett, deputy director of the Information Innovation Office at DARPA, told the podcast he is not worried about another Sputnik-style surprise.
2018年，该机构宣布将在5年内投资20亿美元用于人工智能相关研究。尽管这只相当于中国投资额的零头。DARPA信息创新办公室副主任约翰·埃弗雷特告诉播客，他并不认为苏联人造卫星式的“意外”将会重演。
“Within this $2 billion that we're spending, it's across a very wide range of projects — no two of which are alike — and so we're placing a lot of strategic bets on technologies that may emerge in the future,” Everett said. “A lot of the money that‘s going into the research in China seems to be going into pattern recognition. So they will be able to do incrementally better pattern recognition by spending an enormous amount of money on it. But there's a declining return to incremental expenditures.”
埃弗雷特说:“我们投入的20亿美元将用于各种领域，没有哪两个项目是相同的。因此，我们在未来可能出现的技术上投入了大量战略赌注。中国研究的很多资金似乎都花在了模式识别上。因此，他们将能够靠花费大量的钱而逐步提高模式识别能力。但随着支出的增加，边际收益将会下降。”
原载于
2019年7
月
18
日
Politico，
翻译：
秦欣玥，本文
翻译有删节
