Publications

While generally the advancement and development of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructures is lauded as having the potential to open up a brave new world of positive cyber capacity, there is a decidedly darker underbelly to this potential currently underway. States like China aggressively market the transfer of advanced AI technology around the globe, particularly to allies across the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Far from just being about participating in the global economy or developing the cyber infrastructure of developing nations, China is also sharing its censorship, disinformation, and public opinion shaping technologies that could be the future of regime protection and could undermine grassroots democratic activism. Rather than seeing cyber power as a doorway to a new era of openness and information exchange, China views the true power of cyber as a tool built for traditional safeguarding of national security and domestic political interests. More impressively, most studies show that China should at first catch up to the United States and then surpass it as the AI global leader by 2030. Might this signal a paradigm shift for the potential of AI from cyber peace builder to de facto cyber colonist?