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Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies hold the potential to become critical force multipliers in future armed conflicts. The People's Republic of China has identified AI as key to enhancing its national competitiveness and security. If its current AI plan is successful, China will achieve a substantial military advantage over the United States and its allies. That has significant negative strategic implications for the United States.

This brief assesses U.S.-China competition for influence in countries across the Indo-Pacific.

According to a report from the National Research Council (NRC, 2011), children have an innate curiosity about the natural world, yet many students loose interest in science after elementary school. A national survey of middle‐ and high‐school students reports that only 20% of the students surveyed expressed an interest in science as a career (Project Tomorrow, and PASCO Scientific, 2008). Mayo (2009) suggests one way to increase the number of students interested in science is through videogames. Her initial work indicates learning through videogames can yield a 7%–40% positive learning increase over standard learning through lectures. A key component inherently built into videogames is trying something, failing, and then unabashedly trying again. This “we will all fail” concept is counter to the “everyone is a winner” perception that is proliferating in our culture, where sporting events issue medals and trophies to anyone who participates, the suburbs are littered with “My child is an honor student” bumper stickers, and high‐schools have not one but multiple valedictorians (Best, 2011). Most videogames, to the contrary, are considered boring if everyone wins all the time. Similarly, scientists rarely excel if they do not experience failure to some degree. A recent article by Gerber (2012) posits that to prepare our future scientists, we need to teach them how to experience failure, over and over again, and to teach them how to learn from their failure. Gerber claims today’s science educators are doing the opposite, conveying that failing at science, even a little, is unacceptable. Although conclusive evidence is not yet in place, research suggests that using gaming to present scientific concepts can engage our younger generation of science learners and get them interested in learning (Wang and Hannafin, 2005; Federation of American Scientists [FAS], 2006; Kirriemuir and MacFarlane, 2006; Kiili and Lainema, …