Technological Jingoism and the Domestic Politics of the US-China “AI Arms Race”

All Are Welcome!

January 9, 2025 | 3321 Murphy Hall | Talk: 1-2 p.m.

The rise of large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT has popularized the notion that AI companies are locked in a race to be the first to produce artificial general intelligence (AGI). This narrative is amplified by the geopolitical framing of US-China competition, cast as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism. Layering propaganda atop speculation, technocrats posit that building AGI first is a moral imperative for the United States because the Chinese government would use the advanced technology to assert global political control. This framing not only distorts the discourse around AI itself, but also limits the ways information is constructed, shaping data infrastructures to serve a narrow agenda of economic nationalism.

In this talk, Dr. Shazeda Ahmed argues that democracy is threatened by each new iteration of AI arms race thinking. Drawing upon interview studies in China and the United States, Dr. Ahmed investigates how certain expert communities have transformed ideological stances on AI into knowledge production practices and policies that sustain policymakers’ belief that maintaining the United States’ global technological dominance is a top national security objective. This framing is instrumentalized to justify anti-Asian xenophobia in the proposed TikTok ban, as well as the persecution of Chinese STEM researchers in the US; to defer the accountability of Silicon Valley companies that claim regulation will dampen innovation; and to stymie efforts to safeguard society against well-documented AI harms, including automated discrimination. Yet, despite how deeply AI discourse has become saturated with an air of inevitability, international scholars, civil society advocates, and tech workers committed to trans-Pacific peace point a way forward and out of recursive Cold War logics.

Bio

Shazeda Ahmed is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral (Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship Program) fellow at UCLA. Shazeda completed her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley’s School of Information in 2022, and was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. She has been a research fellow at Upturn, the Mercator Institute for China Studies, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Institute, and NYU’s AI Now Institute.

Shazeda’s research investigates relationships between the state, the firm, and society in the US-China geopolitical rivalry over AI, with implications for information technology policy and human rights. Her work draws from science and technology studies, ranging from her dissertation on the state-firm co-production of China’s social credit system, to her research on the epistemic culture and knowledge production practices in the emerging field of AI safety.