The authors have some concrete policies they want to see adopted:

> launch a large-scale AI literacy initiative across the government

> invest billions of dollars in procurement over the next few years

> expand support for the National AI Research Resource

The article exists to convince someone with the power to direct those billions of dollars to direct them this way. Claiming that the US is falling behind is a popular trick to make that happen.

Presumably the holders of purse strings know that policy papers must not be taken at face value, but if they're unaware that the robots in Chinese factories are far from the AI-driven humanoids of popular imagination, or that the AI Plus Initiative is full of lofty goals with nothing concrete on how to achieve them, they might be fooled nonetheless.

As a former staffer, you are partially correct.

The issue is, most of the decisionmakers on the Hill still have an image of China that is comparable to where it was in the 1990s or 2000s.

Most decisionmakers started their careers in the 1980s to 2000s and only worked within the bubble that is the Hill, and most of their assumptions are predicated on the experiences of an American who was either in or adjacent to the academic and cultural elite of the 1990s and 2000s.

Those people with domain experience have limited incentive to work as staffers or within think tanks because they do not hire broadly, they pay horribly, and domain expertise is only developed through practical experience, which takes a decade to develop.

That is not to say this isn't an issue in other countries (even Chinese and Korean policymakers have fallen into similar traps), but most other countries also try to build an independent and formalized civil and administrative service. The American system is much more hodgepodge and hiring is opaque (eg. The nebulous "federal resume"), meaning most people hired will have went to schools where career services provide training to join government jobs (eg. Top private schools along with public universities in the DMV).

The issue in the US is a coordination issue - we have the right mixture of human, financial, and intellectual capital, but it is not being coordinated.