Technology Takes Time: Review Article of Jeffrey Ding's <i>Technology and the Rise of Great Powers</i>   <i>by Josephine Wolff</i>

Abstract Many scholars have wrestled with the ways that technological innovation can fuel economic growth and result in shifts in political power and military conflict. These arguments have helped motivate a more recent literature looking at artificial intelligence (AI) that has, in many cases, emphasized the need for rapid development of AI technologies for fear of otherwise falling behind other countries and suffering significant economic and national security losses. Jeffrey Ding's Technology and the Rise of Great Powers argues that countries should not fall into the trap of thinking they are engaged in a short-term race to develop the best AI in the next few years because the economic impacts of new technologies arrive more slowly than we think and depend primarily on how well countries diffuse those technologies across their different industry sectors and develop pipelines for building relevant skills. In making this argument, Ding persuasively challenges not just common conceptions of the timeline for how long countries have to develop their AI industries but more broadly the idea that what matters most for capitalizing on the benefits of new technologies is the development or invention of the technology itself, rather than the slower, less glamorous work of implementing it in a variety of different industry settings.