If the race for powerful A.I. is indeed a race among civilizations for control of the future, the United States and European nations should be spending at least 50 times the amount they do on public funding of basic A.I. research. Their model should be the research that led to the internet, funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, created by the Eisenhower administration and arguably the most successful publicly funded science project in American history.

We need to stop pretending that Silicon Valley can compete with China on its own.