The Logic of Strategic Assets: From Oil to Artificial Intelligence

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1 The Logic of Strategic Assets: From Oil to AI Jeffrey Ding and Allan Dafoe* Forthcoming at Security Studies (2021) Abstract What resources and technologies are strategic? This question is often the focus of policy and theoretical debates, since the ?strategic? designation yields valuable resources and elevated attention. These conversations, however, are frustrated by the ambiguity of the very concept. We offer a theory of when decision-makers should designate particular assets as strategic based on the presence of important rivalrous externalities for which socially optimal behavior will not be produced alone by firms or military organizations. We distill three forms of these externalities, which involve cumulative-, infrastructure-, and dependency-strategic logics. While our framework cannot resolve debates about strategic assets, it provides a theoretically grounded conceptual vocabulary to make these debates more productive. To illustrate the analytic value of our framework ...

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• [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.03246