The United States and China fast find themselves in a tech arms race that could define economic and military dominance for decades to come. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has launched a $2 billion plan to tease out the next big ideas for artificial intelligence.

The stakes are huge. A Harvard study two years ago suggested artificial intelligence could tilt military balances in the generations to come the way the airplane and the nuclear bomb did generations ago. The economic impact of AI advances figures to be similarly game changing. And those who break into the lead will have more power machine learning and AI powers at their disposal to dominate.

Where does that leave Kansas? Not in a good place. Vast regions of the state can’t get a decent internet connection. The Kansas City area seemed to catch a break when Google brought faster home internet service to the market in 2012. Yet beyond a few small tech start-ups, it didn’t spawn the silicon prairie so many had hoped for.

Meantime, one gloomy report from 2017 projected how automation spawned by AI and machine learning could eliminate jobs and cut the wages of the jobs that survive. Kansas did not fare well.

That $2 billion of DARPA money? Don’t expect much of it to come here. Think instead of places such as Stanford and MIT. Farming? Yes, we’ll always need food. But the trend of bigger and fewer farms,only figures to accelerate in a world of drones and robots.

Kansas isn’t doomed. The coming National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility could draw more brain power and tech smarts to an animal health corridor of businesses and university researchers that stretches from Manhattan to Columbia, Missouri. If 5G or some other technology solved the rural broadband problems, the cheap cost of living might bring remote workers and a new vibrancy to the state.

But applying human intelligence in how to cope with a world of artificial intelligence could determine whether Kansans can stay Kansans or if they’ll have to flee flyover country.

Scott Canon is the Kansas News Service managing editor.