First of all, yes, of course there is a diffusion of technology for a number of reasons. The first reason is that 30 years ago most of the advances came from the military industrial complex, as President Eisenhower would have called it. You remember the invention of the Internet, or Teflon from the space program.
Today, much of military know-how is coming from the civilian sector. Cyber is an example of that, as are artificial intelligence and social media. Also, of course, civilian technology is far more widespread around the world. More and more countries invest in it, naturally, for their economies. In terms of the military technology, I think we just have to recognize that fact.
The second fact is that many countries around the world have spent a lot of money on developing their own domestic R and D and military capabilities. Brazil now produces submarines and first-class aircraft. I saw a couple of days ago that even Saudi Arabia is intending now to start up its own autonomous defence industry. There are more and more countries below the level of the great powers, if you like, who are now selling advanced military equipment and know-how to each other. Brazil sells to South Korea. South Korea sells to Israel. There is going to be a diffusion in the world.
The other thing, of course, is that countries such as China—let's be frank—are investing in certain areas far more than we are. For example, in artificial intelligence, it's investing about four times what the United States is investing at the moment. China now has the world's biggest and fastest supercomputer, and to date China graduates about eight times more engineering Ph.D.'s from its universities than the United States.
That's not to say that they're all 10 feet tall, of course not: they have their weaknesses as well. That is something that we learned from the Cold War, where we systematically overestimated the Soviet Union for many years. But it does mean that we need to take our own science and technology much more seriously.
You've seen R and D levels decline in many NATO countries. You've even seen people openly criticizing the value of science, scientific evidence, and scientific knowledge. There's the idea that came out in the U.K. Brexit campaign, which was that we don't want to hear from experts any longer—we're tired of that. I think we also need to pay more attention to our own science and technology base.
In NATO, of course, we also need to look more intensively at the impact that artificial intelligence, bioengineering, and new drones and so on are having on our defence posture, and not just to raise our awareness—the ambassadors, for example, had an away day on artificial intelligence last week—but also to look at how these are going to affect the future.
By the way, if I may continue for just one second, don't forget also that the new technologies not only influence the conventional battlefield, such as artificial intelligence, but it may also mean more hybrid warfare as well. They play both in the external aspect, which I was talking about, and in an internal aspect. You can do a lot of things with it that you can't do with a tank, and that's why we need to look at these very seriously.
My own sense is that the free societies, provided they pay attention to this, will generally have the superior technology in the long run.