China's President Xi Jinping (C) talks with China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi (L) and China's State Councillor Yang Jiechi before a meeting with Bangladesh's President Abdul Hamid (not in picture), at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, November 8, 2014. REUTERS/Parker Song/Pool
Stephen Chen, SCMP: Artificial intelligence, immune to fear or favour, is helping to make China’s foreign policy
The programme draws on a huge amount of data, with information ranging from cocktail-party gossip to images taken by spy satellites, to contribute to strategies in Chinese diplomacy.
Attention, foreign-policy makers. You will soon be working with, or competing against, a new type of robot with the potential to change the game of international politics forever.
Diplomacy is similar to a strategic board game. A country makes a move, the other(s) respond. All want to win.
Artificial intelligence is good at board games. To get the game started, the system analyses previous play, learns lessons from defeats or even repeatedly plays against itself to devise a strategy that can be never thought of before by humans.
It has defeated world champions in chess and Go. More recently, it has won at no-limit Texas Hold’em poker, an “imperfect information game” in which a player does not have access to all information at all times, a situation familiar in the world of diplomatic affairs.
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WNU Editor: Diplomacy is primarily a human to human interaction. But can a computer program with access to massive data bases give an advantage to one side when it comes to making diplomatic decisions? I can only speak from my own personal experience when I was a diplomat in China.... and my answer is no. Diplomats are given guidelines and objectives to follow, and we try our best to fulfil them. How we accomplish this is by working with our counterparts to find common ground on issues that are important to us. I did not need a computer/AI system to do my work. I always had a very good idea on what would succeed, and what would not, before walking into a room to negotiate a business/trade agreement. And the reason why I had a good idea on what would succeed and what would not is because I had already spent years eating meals, drinking tea/beer/and hard-stuff, exchanging gifts, and getting to know who my Chinese counterparts were before we even sat down to discuss business. Now can a computer/AI program do that .... nope.
