AI is not a race

This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. If you are a company raising capital it is in your interests to hustle investors into signing cheques to buy into the idea that whoever gets to artificial general intelligence (AGI) first will have an eternal global monopoly. If you are country whose economy depends on such companies, your might see it in your interests to declare that AI is indeed a race. Or if you derive prestige by demonstrating that you have technology comparable to what the incumbent superpower has, then you too have an interest in announcing that you are a challenger in the AI race. None of this, however, means that artificial intelligence technology is a race. A few drivers could well race each other on the highway, but nothing stops other motorists from getting to their own destinations in their own time. When confronted with evidence that the atomic and space ‘races’ of the previous century neither stopped new entrants nor conferred…