LONDON, November 30, Reuters - The chief of Britain's foreign spy service warned on Tuesday that the West's rivals such as China and Russia are racing to master artificial intelligence in a way that could revolutionise geopolitics over the next decade.
The world's spies, from Langley and London to Moscow and Beijing, are trying to grapple with advances in technology that challenge traditional human-led spy operations that have dominated for thousands of years.
Richard Moore, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, said quantum engineering, engineered biology, vast troves of data and advances in computer power were a threat that needed to be addressed by the West.
Our adversaries are pouring money and ambition into mastering artificial intelligence, quantum computing and synthetic biology because they know that mastering these technologies will give them leverage, Moore, who rarely surfaces for speeches, will say on Tuesday.
Moore, a former diplomat who became MI 6 chief in 2020, said technological progress could surpass all tech progress over the next decade.
As a society, we have yet to internalise this stark fact and its potential impact on global geopolitics. He said that it was a white-hot focus for MI 6, and it is a white-hot focus.
Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies have rushed to harness the power of a wide range of sophisticated technologies, sometimes at a faster pace than in the West, which is a concern for the West's spies.
China's economic and military rise over the past 40 years is considered one of the most significant geopolitical events of recent times, along with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, which ended the Cold War.
MI 6, depicted by novelists as the employer of some of the most memorable fictional spies from John le Carr's George Smiley to Ian Fleming's James Bond, operates overseas and is tasked with defending Britain and its interests.
Moore said the service would have to change to harness new technologies.
He will say that we can't replicate the global tech industry and we need to tap into it.