Foreign adversaries frequently manipulate American public opinion and policy toward their own interests by exploiting organic American concerns. The Soviets did that with American nuclear weapons and missile defense. Now, communist China is doing it with AI.
The recent scare campaign surrounding AI bears an eerie resemblance to the Soviet-sponsored “nuclear freeze” operation four decades ago. In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan vowed to modernize America’s aging nuclear weapons arsenal and build a national defense against Soviet missiles. He threw cold water on a discredited arms-control process and alarmed much of the public with his rhetoric. Some of the nuclear concerns were genuine, but some were based on falsehoods the Soviets fanned. The alarm opened the door for Moscow to channel many Americans’ valid concerns into a full-blown active measures campaign to hamstring U.S. technological advances.
Comments