AI and national sovereignty [Cowen and Pahlka]

From Tyler Cowen's discussion with Jennifer Pahlka:

COWEN: Let’s say you’re the nation of Peru, and AI becomes more important. You run a lot of your education system through American AI, a lot of your military, your cybersecurity, processing of social services. At the end of all that, after, I don’t know, 15 years, are you even a sovereign nation still? Are we seeing this fundamental shift in what a government is? If the US government does something, at least it’s US AI. Other than the US and China, it’s far from clear how many countries will have their own AI. What’s going to become of Peru?

PAHLKA: I can’t answer that question, [laughs] but it’s an excellent question. I think you may see countries realize this and take more drastic steps to maintain their sovereignty, which I don’t know how they’re going to do it.

COWEN: I think it’s just stay backward, right? They could just not use AI, and probably some will make that decision.

PAHLKA: I think some will.

COWEN: But that’s a huge cost. Then there’re countries like France, where maybe they can have their own AI. They haven’t succeeded so far, but they could at least make a run at it. Would you tell France, “Make sure you develop your own AI so you’re controlling your own government”?

PAHLKA: Question back to you. Is there some way in which the market fixes this because there’s a market for AI that doesn’t implicate that there’s Serenity?

COWEN: I worry that the economies of scale are in conflict with a number of nations in the world today. We’re going to see a very radical shaking out that will go fully unadvertised, but at the end of it all, geopolitics will be very different. I don’t know that France can build an AI good enough, actually. They had Mistral. They still do. It’s not making money. People want to buy it. Macron says we’re going to basically prop it up, but you can’t just prop it up. It has to be good enough to work and be competitive. I don’t know.

PAHLKA: Won’t there be companies that have enough AI expertise that they’re able to cater to the needs of a sovereign nation and say, “I’ll do this for you in the way that fits your needs”?

COWEN: It could be France contracts with Anthropic, and Anthropic, in a sense, runs the French government, and maybe we trust Anthropic. I’m not necessarily opposed to that by any means, but again, it’s a very different world.

PAHLKA: It is a very different world, and it is very hard to game this out.

COWEN: America and China, for sure, will have their own AIs, and maybe those countries just become much more powerful. Then you’ve got to decide, whose network are you in anyway?

Note that this is only part of a longer interview that covers many topics, including the passivity of Congress, DOGE, preparing government for AGI, public-sector unions, the UK, 50-state capacity, working in gaming, and the best-run state.