OXFORDSHIRE, United Kingdom — The race to develop the most sophisticated artificial intelligence will define geopolitics in the coming decades, much as oil and nuclear weapons defined the 20th century, angel investor Ian Hogarth said at VOICES, BoF’s annual gathering for big thinkers.

Machine learning has become so sophisticated that it is spurring a “fundamental speedup” in scientific research and the development of new technology.

“It’s an uncanny feeling you have when you see a system that has no human info fed into it being more competent,” Hogarth said.

His prescription: governments and companies should cooperate to fund AI research and steer its development toward uses that would benefit humanity as a whole, rather than individual nations or corporations. He compared this effort to a “cross between Wikipedia and the United Nations.”

“AI should be developed as a global public good, accessible to all people in all countries,” he said.

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