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Joseph Alois Schumpeter was one of the most prominent political economists during the first half of the twentieth century. He published prolifically in both German and English on questions of economic theory, economic sociology, economic and social policy, and the history of ideas. A phrase Schumpeter coined to describe the essence of capitalism as he understood it, creative destruction, has become one of the most familiar terms in the economic lexicon.

In politics, Schumpeter was a liberal conservative or perhaps a conservative liberal but he was also deeply influenced by his Marxian contemporaries. As a student at the University of Vienna, Schumpeter was a member of Eugen von Bhm-Bawerks legendary graduate seminar, along with three leading Austro-Marxists Rudolf Hilferding, Otto Bauer, and Emil Lederer and the free-market liberal Ludwig von Mises.

This experience no doubt encouraged Schumpeter to explore many of the same questions that his Marxist contemporaries had posed, although the answers that he formulated differed sharply from theirs. He disagreed with the Marxist view of capitalisms inner contradictions while believing that the ultimate victory of socialism was inevitable anyway. For Schumpeter, the drive toward imperialism and war that was so evident in his own time stemmed from precapitalist social forces that were still at work in European society rather than the logic of capitalism itself.

Schumpeter was born into a prosperous middle-class family in the Moravian town of Triesch on February 8, 1883, a month before the death of Karl Marx. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on January 7, 1950. Schumpeters father, a merchant, had died in 1887, and his mother soon remarried. His new stepfather was a general in the Austro-Hungarian army, so the young Joseph grew up in a distinctly upper-class environment.

He was educated in Vienna at the prestigious Theresianum Academy of Knights of Vienna. Schumpeter went on to spend five years at the University of Vienna between 1901 and 1906, where he studied law, mathematics, and philosophy in addition to economics. His first publication came in 1906, when he was only twenty-three years of age.

From 1909 to 1911, Schumpeter was professor of economics at the University of Czernowitz, moving first to the University of Graz (19111921) and then to the University of Bonn (19251932). In addition to these academic posts, he worked as a lawyer and a financial speculator not to mention a brief stint as minister of finance in the new post-Habsburg Austrian republic between March and October 1919 and spent some time in Britain and the United States.

Schumpeter spent the last eighteen years of his life at Harvard University, where he was president of the Econometric Society (in 1942) and the American Economic Association (in 1948). Were it not for his unexpected death, Schumpeter would also have served as the founding president of the International Economic Association in 1950.

Although there is a substantial literature on Schumpeters life and work, no comprehensive edition of his works has yet been published, whether in English or in German. Richard Sturn suggests that this may reflect the absence of a specific Schumpeter school of economics. Probably best known today as a historian of economic thought, Schumpeter was the author of two hundred journal articles and several influential books, two of which ran to more than a thousand pages: the two-volume Business Cycles and the posthumously published History of Economic Analysis.

However, those interested in Schumpeters thinking, especially from the left, will probably turn first to his most celebrated work, 1942s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, which is a mere 425 pages in length. The book consists of five parts, respectively titled The Marxian doctrine, Can capitalism survive? Can socialism work? Socialism and democracy, and A historical sketch of socialist parties.

It would be impossible in the space of a short article to give a satisfactory account of this complex, scholarly, and highly opinionated work. I will concentrate instead on Schumpeters analysis of the economics of imperialism, which provides an entry point into his broader approach to the capitalist mode of production, its history, and its prospects.

Twenty-three years before the appearance of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter published a lengthy article on The Sociology of Imperialism in a German-language academic journal, which did not appear in English until just after his death. In the version that I have consulted, there are ninety-six pages of text, amounting to perhaps 35,000 words.

Schumpeter began with a brief introductory section outlining the nature of the problem, in which he argued that aggressive attitudes on the part of states need not be a simple reflection of the populations concrete economic interests. Indeed, in the case of imperialism, we might say that nations and classes seek expansion for the sake of expanding, war for the sake of fighting, victory for the sake of winning, dominion for the sake of ruling. In this spirit, he defined imperialism as the objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion.

The author did acknowledge that neo-Marxist theory had attempted to provide an economic explanation for imperialism, reducing it to the economic class interests of the age in question (emphasis in original, and hereafter). Although he conceded that the Marxist view was by far the most serious contribution that had been made to the analysis of imperialism and agreed that there was much truth in it, Schumpeter proceeded to criticize it at some length.

He began by describing the strongly anti-imperialist sentiments that had prevailed in mid-nineteenth-century Britain in a section with the strange title Imperialism as a catchphrase. After a lengthy account of the way imperialism had operated in ancient times, the medieval period, and the age of absolute monarchy, Schumpeter devoted the final third of the essay to discussing the relationship between imperialism and capitalism.

At the start of this concluding section, Schumpeter returned to the prevalence of non-rational and irrational, purely instinctual inclinations towards war and conquest. He believed that many and perhaps most wars throughout history had been waged without any adequate reason. According to Schumpeter, this in turn was strong evidence that psychological dispositions and social structures acquired in the dim past . . . tend to maintain themselves and to continue in effect long after they have lost their meaning and their life-preserving function.

On the strength of this analysis, Schumpeter rejected the argument of Vladimir Lenin and other Marxist thinkers that there was a necessary link between imperialism and capitalism. Imperialism was in fact atavistic in character and stemmed from the living conditions, not of the present but of the past put in terms of the economic interpretation of history, from past rather than present relations of production. In political terms, we should see imperialism as the product not of capitalist democracy but rather of the earlier stage of absolute autocracy.

Schumpeter insisted that under capitalism, there was much less excess energy to be vented in war and conquest than in any pre-capitalist society. In a capitalist society, the pursuit of profit absorbed the energies of the population, with wars of conquest rightly seen as troublesome distractions, destructive of lifes meaning, a diversion from the accustomed and therefore true task.

The economist cited what he considered to be strong evidence of the powerful anti-imperialist tendencies at work in capitalist society. Those tendencies included deep opposition to militarism, military expenditure, and war, which were most powerful among industrial workers but also manifested in large sections of the capitalist class.

It was no accident, he suggested, that of all the capitalist nations, the United States was the one least inclined toward imperialist adventures and also the least burdened with pre-capitalist elements, survivals, reminiscences, and powerful factors. We should look upon the imperialist tendencies that could indeed be found within capitalism as alien elements, carried into the world of capitalism from the outside, supported by non-capitalist factors in modern life.

Schumpeter then directly addressed the neo-Marxist claim that imperialism was the product of a new, dangerous stage of monopoly capitalism. He acknowledged that some sections of the capitalist class do indeed benefit from imperialism most obviously entrepreneurs in the war industries. However, Schumpeter argued, where free trade prevails no class has an interest in forcible expansion as such.

In a lengthy discussion of the economic effects of tariffs and the broader political implications of protectionism, Schumpeter cited Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding favorably, crediting them with having been the first to recognize and describe the importance of what was happening in this field. He also praised Hilferding for having taken his distance from a pessimistic view about the prospects of capitalism that he found in the work of Marx:

It is not true that the capitalist system as such must collapse from imminent necessity, that it necessarily makes its continued existence impossible by its own growth and development. Marxs line of reasoning on this point shows serious defects, and when these are corrected the proof vanishes. It is to the great credit of Hilferding that he abandoned this thesis of Marxist theory.

A footnote to this passage anticipated one of the most striking arguments that Schumpeter later made in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy:

Capitalism is its own undoing but in a sense different from that implied by Marx. Society is bound to grow beyond capitalism, but this will be because the achievements of capitalism are likely to make it superfluous, not because its internal contradictions are likely to make its continuance impossible.

Schumpeter was much closer to the neo-Marxist position on the role of financial capital in the growth of monopoly. He drew an interesting distinction between (financial) capitalists and (industrial) entrepreneurs: Although the relation between capitalists and entrepreneurs is one of the typical and fundamental conflicts of the capitalist economy, monopoly capitalism has virtually fused the big banks and cartels into one. This process had created a social group that carries great political weight, and which possessed

a strong, undeniable, economic interest in such things as productive tariffs, cartels, monopoly prices, forced exports (dumping), an aggressive economic policy, an aggressive foreign policy generally, and war, including wars of expansion with a typically imperialist character.

He also identified further motives for this group to support imperialism, including an interest in the conquest of lands producing raw materials and foodstuffs, with a view to facilitating self-sufficient warfare, and the profits to be derived from rising wartime consumption. While unorganized capitalists would at best reap a trifling profit from these activities, organized capital is sure to profit hugely.

And yet, Schumpeter warned, the final word in any presentation of this aspect of modern economic life must be one of warning against over-estimating it. The only capitalists with a real material interest in what he termed export monopolism were the entrepreneurs and their ally, high finance. Small producers and workers had nothing to gain.

His conclusion was that export monopolism, contrary to the arguments of Marxist thinkers, did not arise from the inherent laws of capitalist development. Capitalism remained intensely competitive, and it was a basic fallacy to describe imperialism as a necessary phase of capitalism, or even to speak of the development of capitalism into imperialism.

So what did explain the rise of imperialism? Once again, Schumpeter emphasized the survival of precapitalist interests, methods, and ways of thinking: Established habits of thought and action tend to persist, and hence the spirit of guild and monopoly at first maintained itself, even where capitalism was in sole possession of the field. In its everyday life, its ideology, and its politics, Europe remained greatly under the influence of the feudal substance . . . while the bourgeoisie can assert its interests everywhere, it rules only in exceptional circumstances, and then only briefly.

Schumpeter summarized what he considered to be the historical and sociological sources of modern imperialism, which he saw as

a heritage of the autocratic state, of its structural elements, organizational forms, interest alignments, and human attitudes, the outcome of pre-capitalist forces which the autocratic state has reorganized. It would never have been evolved by the inner logic of capitalism itself.

According to Schumpeter, the pro-military interests within the capitalist class joined up with these precapitalist forces in an alliance which kept alive war instincts and ideas of overlordship, male supremacy, and triumphant glory ideas that would otherwise long since [have] died. He finished off the article by affirming the ancient truth that the dead always rule the living.

Discussion of imperialism was rather limited in Schumpeters subsequent work. There were three references to the subject in his Business Cycles. They included a lengthy footnote on Rudolf Hilferding in which he stated that the rule of the financier over industry, still more over national politics, is a newspaper fairy tale almost ludicrously at variance with facts. The index of History of Economic Analysis did not contain the word imperialism, but Schumpeter used the term in his one substantial reference to the neo-Marxists, which largely consisted of an apology for the authors inability to deal with their ideas in any great detail.

However, Schumpeter did devote six and a half pages to the question in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, where he summarized the Marxian theory of imperialism and commended its strong points before proceeding to offer some sharp criticism. While this analysis came in the chapter titled Marx the teacher, it also acknowledged the later contribution of neo-Marxist theorists such as Bauer, Hilferding, Max Adler, Rosa Luxemburg, and Fritz Sternberg. All of these writers drew on Marxs account of the falling rate of profit as articulated in volume III of Capital.

According to Marxs presentation, a rising organic composition of capital combined with a declining rate of exploitation in the advanced capitalist countries put constant downward pressure on the profit rate and created a powerful incentive for the export of capital to less developed parts of the world. If this framework was valid, Schumpeter observed, imperialism would have a strong economic basis, with colonization used to safeguard overseas investment and internecine war between rival bourgeoisies, an inevitable consequence. As he noted, the Marxists regarded this as a stage, hopefully the final stage, of capitalism.

This Marxian synthesis, Schumpeter conceded, did seem to follow beautifully from two fundamental premises . . . the theory of classes and the theory of accumulation, and also appeared to display a close alliance with historical and contemporaneous fact. Yet on closer inspection, he insisted, this was not the case. In fact, the heroic time of colonialism had been precisely the time of early and innovative capitalism when accumulation was in its beginnings. Such expansion benefitted the proletariat more than the capitalists, and it was never under the control of the latter:

As a matter of fact, very little influence on foreign policy has been exerted by big business. Capitalist attitudes towards foreign policy are predominantly adaptive rather than causative, today more than ever. Also, they hinge to an astonishing degree on short-run considerations equally remote from any deeply laid plans and from any definite objective class interests.

For Schumpeter, the Marxist theory of imperialism was ultimately a superstition, comparable to the conspiracy theories about Jewish influence propagated by antisemites. Continuing his practice in Business Cycles, Schumpeter pulled no rhetorical punches, referring to the neo-Marxian theory as a horrible platitude that consisted of nursery tales.

What do Schumpeters rather sparse writings on imperialism tell us about his attitude toward Marxian political economy as a whole? First, while Schumpeter viewed the capitalist system as being quite unstable, he did not think it was destined to collapse, still less to stagnate. In his perspective, capitalism was subject to cyclical fluctuations, but the upswings were every bit as strong as the downturns, with depressed conditions never lasting for very long.

In spite of this, Schumpeter still believed the triumph of socialism to be inevitable in the long run, although this was not a political prospect that he welcomed. However, this would be due to the victory of anti-capitalist ideology rather than the objective economic contradictions of the capitalist system.

Second, he argued that successive waves of intense innovation would ensure that competitive forces remained strong enough to prevent the emergence of a late stage of monopoly capitalism, as the Marxists claimed would happen. Moreover, the ability of many entrepreneurs to finance their innovations out of retained earnings would keep the power of the banks in check.

These two propositions led to a third: for Schumpeter, there was no irresistible pressure for imperialist expansion on narrowly economic grounds. Capitalist countries might or might not benefit from a particular instance of imperialism. But imperialism as such was not, contrary to the Marxist view, a necessary condition for the survival of the capitalist system.

In fact, according to Schumpeter, the mutual gains to be made from trade and international investment were so large that capitalism was in fact an innately peaceful system, as nineteenth-century liberals such as Richard Cobden had maintained. It was a fundamental mistake to identify twentieth-century capitalism with aggressive militarism and the annexation of overseas territories.

For Schumpeter, imperialism was thus an atavism: a survival of the precapitalist, feudal mode of production that was not motivated by any rational demand for the preservation of the capitalist one, which could survive and indeed fare much better without it. Even in predominantly capitalist states, it was noncapitalist, aristocratic social forces that largely determined foreign policy, with the same irrational elements that had prevailed in precapitalist societies serving as an ideological justification.

Finally, Schumpeter considered the entire Marxian approach to the capitalist mode of production to be deeply flawed on several levels. For him, the most crucial Marxist error was the assertion that the forces of production dominated everything else in society, including class relations, institutions of government, and political ideologies. Schumpeter insisted that society was much more complicated than that, even in its capitalist phase.

His encounter with the Austro-Marxists certainly had a heavy influence on Schumpeter, prompting him to ask many of the same questions. However, he came up with some very different answers, and would surely have been equally skeptical toward the economic, political, and social theories that are prevalent among Marxists today. A serious engagement with Schumpeters work can thus be an important and stimulating challenge for those who still identify with the Marxist critique of capitalism.

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Joseph Schumpeter and the Economics of Imperialism - Jacobin magazine

Victor Grayson: In Search of Britains Lost Revolutionaryby Harry TaylorPluto Press 16.99

HARRY TAYLOR hasnt solved every riddle involving Victor Grayson, but his investigation of this complex and enigmatic figure is thorough and enthralling. Grayson, a charismatic and fiery socialist orator, was seduced into serving the establishment he hated before his mysterious disappearance in September 1920.

The book builds on earlier biographies by socialist journalist Reg Groves and Labour peer David Clark, but roundly refutes a bizarre conspiracy theory concocted by right-wing journalist Donald McCormick. The motives for further investigation are Taylors discovery of fresh information, and his conviction that Graysons story holds lessons for the British left in the wake of the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn. Theres a sense in which were haunted by Grayson.

We begin with a childhood of privation and challenge in working-class Liverpool. In a pivotal episode, the teenage Grayson stows away on a ship bound for Chile and is put ashore in Pembrokeshire. The 165-mile walk to his home city reveals it has no monopoly on destitution.

The book explores the tension between Graysons Christianity and socialism, the bisexuality that led to him being blackmailed, his attractiveness to older and wealthier female admirers, and his natural flair for oratory. Taylor rejects the established image of Grayson as a hot-headed troublemakerwith no grasp of ideology or policy. His calls for direct action were consonant with the beliefs of the Labour leadership at the time, and he had a working knowledge of Marxs writing.

The tragic sweep of Graysons life is punctuated with fascinating cameos. For example, I was surprised to discover he received support from writers Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton, whose suspicion of socialism was offset by disillusionment with the party-political system.

Graysons legend centres on an astonishing by-election victory at Colne Valley in 1907, achieved without official Labour Party support, but with a blend of Christian socialism, Marxist economics, and dazzling eloquence. In Parliament, his provocative attempts to secure an unemployment debate led to Labour MPs unanimously supporting Liberals and Tories in voting for his suspension. His behaviour was attributed to drunkenness, but Taylor finds evidence of a premeditated and principled stand.

Graysons drinking did eventually derail his career. Later, he mustered working-class support for the first world war on behalf of his old adversary Churchill, served at Passchendaele and condemned striking workers.

Taylors compelling scholarship assesses Graysons career in the context of his era, but we are challenged to draw conclusions relevant to our own. The author focuses on the need for a Labour Party responsive to the needs of working people and based on strong structures and organisation.

Another moral to be drawn about progress towards socialism is the need to focus on the song rather than its singer.

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Focus on the song rather than its singer - Morning Star Online

Debate

14:30

by Eric Kaufmann

Not so hip anymore

Random House, the publishing giant, recently cancelled plans to publish a collection of Norman Mailers political writings on the centenary of his birth in 2023 after a junior staffer objected to the title of his 1957 essay, The White Negro. Mailers essay celebrated what he took to be the uninhibited, expressive ethos of the African-American hipster, with his jazz, style and dance. This Hip sensibility was contrasted to the spiritually repressed and boring Square quality of white America.

Left-modernism is the dominant ideology in western elite culture, sometimes referred to as the successor ideology. Its an uneasy compound of liberalism and socialism in which the cartridge of liberalism, with its historic concern for the rights of minorities and desire to be free of social constraints, is plugged into the slot in socialisms victim-oppressor console once reserved for the working class.

Mailers Beat Generation exemplified the Left-modernist ethos, valorising the downtrodden as spiritually superior to the white middle class. Mailers critique in The White Negro recalled Carl Van Vechtens 1926 novel Nigger Heaven. Van Vechten belonged to Americas first generation of cultural Leftists, the Young Intellectuals, who brought drug-taking, modern art and critiques of white Protestantism to New Yorks Greenwich Village in the 1912-17 period.

Van Vechtens innovation was a form of slumming in which white bohemians started going up to Harlem to see black jazz. Like Mailer, Young Intellectuals like Van Vechten viewed African-Americans as a source of spiritual depth and liberation from the oppressive structures of Protestant white America. As Mailer wrote in his essay, In such places as Greenwich Village, a mnage--trois was completedthe bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro.

The phenomenon of WASP Americans turning against their own ethnic group began in pre-World War I Greenwich Village. For Randolph Bourne, a key figure in the Young Intellectuals, writing in 1917, The Anglo-Saxon element is guilty of what every dominant race is guilty of in every European country: the imposition of its own culture upon the minority peoples. Bourne equated Anglo-Saxondom with masculine domination, blending anti-whiteness and feminism into a kind of wokeness avant la lettre.

By the 1920s, in the wake of immigration restriction and the prohibition of alcohol, the Left-modernist critique of the countrys WASP ethnic majority had become a staple of the American literary world, featuring in novels such as Main Street or even The Great Gatsby.

Where socialism believes in equality-in-similarity, Left-modernism celebrates equality-in-diversity, with little emphasis on community. As radical fifties avatar C. Wright Mills confided, he could appreciate liberty and equality, but not fraternity. Left-modernism appealed to bohemian intellectuals because it allowed them to combine artistic experimentation and self-expression with egalitarian politics. When the Soviet Union banned artistic experimentation in favour of socialist realism in 1938, this helped alienate a significant section of the western cultural Left, many of whom turned against communism.

From the 1910s to the 1960s, Left-modernism largely managed to keep its twin balls of radical Leftism and modernist individualism in the air. But with the victory of civil rights and the rise of minority social movements as Left-modernism acquired institutional power through the expansion of universities and television the ideology wobbled on its axis, elevating its Leftist superego over its modernist id.

Viewed through its new politically-correct lens, the anti-white romanticisation of black Americans exemplified by Van Vechten or Mailer became a personification of the very whiteness they railed against: a micro-aggression rooted in colonialist domination and cultural appropriation.

Mailer chose to ride the shark of anti-whiteness, so his estate shouldnt be surprised when it turns on him.

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Norman Mailer is reaping the anti-whiteness he sowed - UnHerd

A global technology revolution is now underway. The worlds leading powers are racing to develop and deploy new technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing that could shape everything about our lives from whereweget energy, to how we do our jobs, to how wars are fought. We want America to maintain our scientific and technological edge, because its critical to us thriving in the 21st century economy.

Investments in AI have led to transformative advances now impacting our everyday lives, including mapping technologies, voice-assisted smart phones, handwriting recognition for mail delivery, financial trading, smart logistics, spam filtering, language translation, and more. AI advances are also providing great benefits to our social wellbeing in areas such as precision medicine, environmental sustainability, education, and public welfare.

The term artificial intelligence means a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments.

The Department of State focuses on AI because it is at the center of the global technological revolution; advances in AI technology present both great opportunities and challenges. The United States, along with our partners and allies, can both further our scientific and technological capabilities and promote democracy and human rights by working together to identify and seize the opportunities while meeting the challenges by promoting shared norms and agreements on the responsible use of AI.

Together with our allies and partners, the Department of State promotes an international policy environment and works to build partnerships that further our capabilities in AI technologies, protect our national and economic security, and promote our values. Accordingly, the Department engages in various bilateral and multilateral discussions to support responsible development, deployment, use, and governance of trustworthy AI technologies.

The Department provides policy guidance to implement trustworthy AI through theOrganization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)AI Policy Observatory, a platform established in February 2020 to facilitate dialogue between stakeholders and provide evidence-based policy analysis in the areas where AI has the most impact.The State Department provides leadership and support to the OECD Network of Experts on AI (ONE AI), which informs this analysis.The United States has 47 AI initiatives associated with the Observatory that help contribute to COVID-19 response, invest in workforce training, promote safety guidance for automated transportation technologies, andmore.

The OECDs Recommendation on Artificial Intelligence is the backbone of the activities at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) and the OECD AI Policy Observatory. In May 2019, the United States joined together with likeminded democracies of the world in adopting the OECD Recommendation on Artificial Intelligence, the first set of intergovernmental principles for trustworthy AI. The principles promote inclusive growth, human-centered values, transparency, safety and security, and accountability. The Recommendation also encourages national policies and international cooperation to invest in research and development and support the broader digital ecosystem for AI. The Department of State champions the principles as the benchmark for trustworthy AI, which helps governments design national legislation.

GPAI is a voluntary, multi-stakeholder initiative launched in June 2020 for the advancement of AI in a manner consistent with democratic values and human rights. GPAIs mandate is focused on project-oriented collaboration, which it supports through working groups looking at responsible AI, data governance, the future of work, and commercialization and innovation. As a founding member, the United States has played a critical role in guiding GPAI and ensuring it complements the work of the OECD.

In the context of military operations in armed conflict, the United States believes that international humanitarian law (IHL) provides a robust and appropriate framework for the regulation of all weapons, including those using autonomous functions provided by technologies such as AI. Building a better common understanding of the potential risks and benefits that are presented by weapons with autonomous functions, in particular their potential to strengthen compliance with IHL and mitigate risk of harm to civilians, should be the focus of international discussion. The United States supports the progress in this area made by the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, Group of Governmental Experts on Emerging Technologies in the Area of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (GGE on LAWS), which adopted by consensus 11 Guiding Principles on responsible development and use of LAWS in 2019. The State Department will continue to work with our colleagues at the Department of Defense to engage the international community within the LAWS GGE.

Learnmore about what specific bureaus and offices are doing to support this policy issue:

TheGlobal Engagement Centerhas developed a dedicated effort for the U.S. Government to identify, assess, test and implement technologies against the problems of foreign propaganda and disinformation, in cooperation with foreign partners, private industry and academia.

The Office of the Under Secretary for Managementuses AI technologies within the Department of State to advance traditional diplomatic activities,applying machine learning to internal information technology and management consultant functions.

TheOffice of the Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environmentengages internationally to support the U.S. science and technology (S&T) enterprise through global AI research and development (R&D) partnerships, setting fair rules of the road for economic competition, advocating for U.S. companies, and enabling foreign policy and regulatory environments that benefit U.S. capabilities in AI.

TheOffice of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Securityfocuses on the security implications of AI, including potential applications in weapon systems, its impact on U.S. military interoperability with its allies and partners,its impact on stability,and export controls related to AI.

TheOffice of the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rightsand its component bureaus and offices focus on issues related to AI and governance, human rights, including religious freedom, and law enforcement and crime, among others.

TheOffice of the Legal Adviserleads on issues relating to AI in weapon systems (LAWS), in particular at the Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems convened under the auspices of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.

For more information on federalprograms and policyon artificial intelligence, visitai.gov.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) - United States Department of ...

Artificial intelligence leverages computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind.

While a number of definitions of artificial intelligence (AI) have surfaced over the last few decades, John McCarthy offers the following definition in this 2004 paper(PDF, 106 KB) (link resides outside IBM), " It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable."

However, decades before this definition, the birth of the artificial intelligence conversation was denoted by Alan Turing's seminal work, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (PDF, 89.8 KB)(link resides outside of IBM), which was published in 1950. In this paper, Turing, often referred to as the "father of computer science", asks the following question, "Can machines think?" From there, he offers a test, now famously known as the "Turing Test", where a human interrogator would try to distinguish between a computer and human text response. While this test has undergone much scrutiny since its publish, it remains an important part of the history of AI as well as an ongoing concept within philosophy as it utilizes ideas around linguistics.

Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig then proceeded to publish, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach(link resides outside IBM), becoming one of the leading textbooks in the study of AI. In it, they delve into four potential goals or definitions of AI, which differentiates computer systems on the basis of rationality and thinking vs. acting:

Human approach:

Ideal approach:

Alan Turings definition would have fallen under the category of systems that act like humans.

At its simplest form, artificial intelligence is a field, which combines computer science and robust datasets, to enable problem-solving. It also encompasses sub-fields of machine learning and deep learning, which are frequently mentioned in conjunction with artificial intelligence. These disciplines are comprised of AI algorithms which seek to create expert systems which make predictions or classifications based on input data.

Today, a lot of hype still surrounds AI development, which is expected of any new emerging technology in the market. As noted in Gartners hype cycle (link resides outside IBM), product innovations like, self-driving cars and personal assistants, follow a typical progression of innovation, from overenthusiasm through a period of disillusionment to an eventual understanding of the innovations relevance and role in a market or domain. As Lex Fridman notes here (link resides outside IBM) in his MIT lecture in 2019, we are at the peak of inflated expectations, approaching the trough of disillusionment.

As conversations emerge around the ethics of AI, we can begin to see the initial glimpses of the trough of disillusionment. To read more on where IBM stands within the conversation around AI ethics, read more here.

Weak AIalso called Narrow AI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)is AI trained and focused to perform specific tasks. Weak AI drives most of the AI that surrounds us today. Narrow might be a more accurate descriptor for this type of AI as it is anything but weak; it enables some very robust applications, such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, IBM Watson, and autonomous vehicles.

Strong AI is made up of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). Artificial general intelligence (AGI), or general AI, is a theoretical form of AI where a machine would have an intelligence equaled to humans; it would have a self-aware consciousness that has the ability to solve problems, learn, and plan for the future. Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI)also known as superintelligencewould surpass the intelligence and ability of the human brain. While strong AI is still entirely theoretical with no practical examples in use today, that doesn't mean AI researchers aren't also exploring its development. In the meantime, the best examples of ASI might be from science fiction, such as HAL, the superhuman, rogue computer assistant in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Since deep learning and machine learning tend to be used interchangeably, its worth noting the nuances between the two. As mentioned above, both deep learning and machine learning are sub-fields of artificial intelligence, and deep learning is actually a sub-field of machine learning.

Deep learning is actually comprised of neural networks. Deep in deep learning refers to a neural network comprised of more than three layerswhich would be inclusive of the inputs and the outputcan be considered a deep learning algorithm. This is generally represented using the following diagram:

The way in which deep learning and machine learning differ is in how each algorithm learns. Deep learning automates much of the feature extraction piece of the process, eliminating some of the manual human intervention required and enabling the use of larger data sets. You can think of deep learning as "scalable machine learning" as Lex Fridman noted in same MIT lecture from above. Classical, or "non-deep", machine learning is more dependent on human intervention to learn. Human experts determine the hierarchy of features to understand the differences between data inputs, usually requiring more structured data to learn.

"Deep" machine learning can leverage labeled datasets, also known as supervised learning, to inform its algorithm, but it doesnt necessarily require a labeled dataset. It can ingest unstructured data in its raw form (e.g. text, images), and it can automatically determine the hierarchy of features which distinguish different categories of data from one another. Unlike machine learning, it doesn't require human intervention to process data, allowing us to scale machine learning in more interesting ways.

There are numerous, real-world applications of AI systems today. Below are some of the most common examples:

The idea of 'a machine that thinks' dates back to ancient Greece. But since the advent of electronic computing (and relative to some of the topics discussed in this article) important events and milestones in the evolution of artificial intelligence include the following:

IBM has been a leader in advancing AI-driven technologies for enterprises and has pioneered the future of machine learning systems for multiple industries. Based on decades of AI research, years of experience working with organizations of all sizes, and on learnings from over 30,000 IBM Watson engagements, IBM has developed the AI Ladder for successful artificial intelligence deployments:

IBM Watson gives enterprises the AI tools they need to transform their business systems and workflows, while significantly improving automation and efficiency. For more information on how IBM can help you complete your AI journey, explore the IBM portfolio of managed services and solutions

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What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? - India | IBM