Emerging Technologies and International Security

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The rapid advancements and improvements of recent years and months have invigorated discussions about how emerging technologies influence and transform political relations and security concerns. As their awe-inspiring capabilities are largely still unrealized and uncertain, emerging technologies carry great promise while also posing unique challenges to national and international security as they shrink decision-making timelines, accelerate data-processing speeds, suggest unforeseen capacities for sensing and computing, or potentially shift power relations, while undermining existing standards of political, legal, and ethical conduct.

This panel brings together five contributions that develop conceptualizations, theories, and empirical assessments of different emerging technologies and their role in shaping national and international security issues. Collectively, the papers assess the propagation, perceptions, and politics of emerging technologies, as well as to what extent these dynamics are (or are not) unique to this particular type of technology. Bringing together a range of methodological approaches from historical comparison to discourse analysis, this panel tackles these questions that shape a recent but rapidly developing field within Political Science.

In the first paper, Julie George develops a theory of proliferation for emerging technologies. Taking the development of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and cyber technologies in the context of today’s central technology competitor nations, the United States and China, George argues that technologies successfully propagate depending on their mode of acquisition and the existence (or absence) of international governance structures concerning a particular technology. In doing so, George offers a novel proposal of how emerging technologies might be defined to better capture their character and likelihood of proliferation. George’s theoretical approach helps to assess when and how emerging technologies could shift power relations and, as a consequence, transform today’s international security landscape. Using the example of quantum technologies (QT), Kristen Csenkey’s paper connects to the theme of technology proliferation and expands the theoretical to non-state and multi-scalar actors. By developing a theory on the ‘assetization’ of QT, Csenkey shows how a plethora of actors participate directly and indirectly in the global quantum market and negotiate power relations as they create QT as an asset with market value. In so doing, Csenkey not only reveals how contested interactions of the public and private sectors shape the governance of technologies with potentially immense security impact on a national and global scale.

The next three contributions pick up the theme of perceptions of emerging technologies. They speak directly to one another as both arguments reveal how not only the real use, but already the mere promise, of AI transforms not only security practice, but conceptions of security issues themselves, as they show how security, war, and strategic decision-making are reformulated by techno-optimists to be computable and quantifiable rather than fundamentally messy and uncertain. Deepening the case study of QT with qualitative evidence, Samantha Bradshaw and Gabrielle Lim examine how ideas of quantum computing feature in security narratives. By comparing scientific and technological perspectives, they examine how these contribute to conceptions of threat. Shifting the focus to another, extremely prominent and highly contested emerging technology, Cameron Hunter and Bleddyn Bowen argue that AI will not be able to replace strategic decision-making in the highest military rank. Countering techno-optimist assumptions that AI can emulate human decision-making perfectly, Hunter and Bowen highlight how decision-making in war requires abductive reasoning, of which machine learning algorithms are, by definition, not capable. Finally, Johanna Rodehau-Noack develops a related argument as she examines the role of AI and ML in the prediction and prevention of armed conflict. Drawing on interview data with developers and users of ML prediction models, she shows how these models’ opacity, a feature that is unique to this type of technology, policymakers can delegate accountability to the algorithm. In doing so, political issues can be reformulated into technological ones, thus opening options for action that they would not have without the use of technology.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security 

Individual Presentations

• Mapping the Proliferation of Emerging Technologies - Julie George, Cornell University

• Quantum Computing and Security Imaginaries - Samantha Bradshaw, American University; Gabrielle Lim, University of Toronto

• Artificial Intelligence, Command Decisions, and Kitsch Visions of War - Cameron Hunter, University of Copenhagen; Bleddyn Bowen

• Bigger, Faster, Better? Techno-Optimism and Conflict Anticipation - Johanna Rodehau-Noack, Stanford University

Chair

• Johanna Rodehau-Noack Stanford University

Discussant

• Margaret E Kosal Georgia Institute of Technology