Why do nations need concern themselves with AI Sovereignty? An enlightened response to unpack the complexity of this questions is to ask whether or not a national AI strategy is an option or a requirement for any nation? If we take a look at the current core components of a nation do we explicitly find AI in it?
A nation is a socio-cultural group of people where there is a shard artifacts of identity, culture, language, history. Again, this stands independent of AI technology. Nations can exist without their dimensions of a state, that is, a nations expressed organized political stripe that forms its government and control its territory. States are qualified for joining the UN as members.
The core function of a State’s is to ensure sovereignty over their nation’s territory which allows the narratives that define a people, communication, history and traditions that unify them to thrive. Artificial Intelligence can pose a threat to that sovereignty in at a state level. However, doing so is an explicit act of war, say sending in autonomous drones across borders to bomb factories.
Artificial Intelligence is for more reasons than auto-piloting a drone (we had that before AI) the greatest technology yet invented, is also capable of understanding language, generating stories, translating languages, documenting history, deciding what images of cultural significance and meaning to surface, share and propel across social media with its algorithms. Artificial Intelligence can disrupt, redirect, and reduce culture over time at a scale not imaginable by any means before.
It’s a lot more efficient for bad actors to use AI to change a nation by subterfuge than by attacking its state layer. Ironically, the best defense against rogue AI is for a nation to enshrine an aspect of the defense of its existence by designing and controlling its own inoculation of AI advocacy, a plan of AI Sovereignty. This plan is a mechanism of policies and AI technology to ensures the core pillars of nationhood are not slowly dispelled electronically that the collective memory of its people cannot rationalize it physically. If a nation loose the significant meaning and connection to its history, communication, practices, worship, artistic expression, cultural values it will cease to exist.
AI Sovereignty is only one variable to protect nationhood. A global marketplace, economy and widespread travel continues to facilitate the natural, voluntary and peaceful sharing of ideas and universal commonalities of man. However, where AI is used as a way of aggression to weaken state, with the ultimate goal of taking away the people’s independence of determining their own path it should not be tolerated as its a matter of survival.
All nations need to understand the importance of AI Sovereignty as without a plan of defense on the digital frontier, the physical frontier and their state is already dissipating or quickly simultaneously converging on an assimilation to something else across its generations of most active online users in the youth and adult segments. AI Sovereignty is a requirement to protect the most important core element of any nation, it is the people – the human minds that create, define and share a destiny of artifacts that express their unified existence.
