What are the key „emerging technologies“ in the Tech War? I’ve previously noted that the concept itself only rose to prominence in the 1980s and has become an important frame through which these kinds of „special“, politically salient technologies are viewed. And looking at the literature, emerging technologies share certain attributes: „(i) radical novelty, (ii) relatively fast growth, (iii) coherence, (iv) prominent impact, and (v) uncertainty and ambiguity“ (Rotolo et al. 2015: 1828). And I love Carla Alvial-Palavicino’s argument „that emerging technologies only exist in the future“ (2015: 135). But which specific technologies show up in political narratives? Sources We…
Schlagwort: Artificial Intelligence
As global politics is evolving away from the “liberal international order” towards a “new bipolarity” or a multipolar world order, we observe a deepening and intensifying competition for technological leadership among major powers. You know the relevant terms – the „AI (Arms) Race“, „technological sovereignty“, the „Chip War“, etc. To be sure, technological competition has always been an element of great power politics – just remember the Space Race. Nonetheless, this competition for technological capabilities in „emerging technologies“ among major actors (the US and China in particular) has clearly intensified over the past decade or so. In select technological fields,…
Although the competition for artificial intelligence leadership is not an arms race in the classic sense, the narrative of an „AI Arms Race“ has been popular, especially among US defence circles. Other people have thoroughly debunked this notion already, so I will not belabor this any further, except to point out a German-language article by Carlo Diehl and myself from last year. In it, we gave a brief overview and summary of US, Chinese, and EU policies for AI. Carlo also came up with this masterful timeline of key documents and policies from 2016 to early 2021. Given how quickly…
I’ll be at the 2023 Conference of the International Relations Section of the German Association for Political Research which is held this week in scenic Friedrichshafen, barring any Deutsche Bahn shenanigans. My schedule has become quite the thing: On Wednesday I’m a discussant on Panel A4 „Transnational Infrastructures and Global Order“, commenting on papers by Alke Jenss and Benjamin Schuetze, Jana Hönke, Marieluna Frank, as well as Joscha Abels and Leo Bieling. After that, I’ll be on Panel B2 „High Tech Politics: Technologie zwischen Global Governance und Großmachtkonkurrenz“, which I have co-organized alongside Maximilian Mayer. Kai Oppermann and I will…
The „Tech War“ project continues apace. While we are busy coding policy documents (first Chinese, now American), we have compiled our theoretical approach, our research design and some initial results for a conference paper that we will present at the 2023 Swiss Network of International Studies Biennial Conference and the Open Conference of the IR Section of the German Association for Political Science next week. Here’s our conclusions so far. The three „technopoles“ (China, the US, the EU) attach a great importance to AI and their own R&D capabilities. This is evidenced not just by a multitude of statements but…
Back in February, we began work on the „Narratives of the Tech War“ project – we being Kai Oppermann and Jakob Landwehr-Matlé of the Technical University of Chemnitz as well as myself. Funded by the German Foundation for Peace Research, we conduct a pilot study into how narratives of technological leadership in Artificial Intelligence influence and are influenced by great-power relations. We compare policy narratives in China, the US, and the EU to see how these actors construct their narratives, how these narratives shape policy, and how actors react to each other’s narratives. Creating the codebook Narrative research is closely…
I am happy to announce that two contributions have been accepted to the Science Peace Security (SPS) ’23 conference this September in Darmstadt. This is the third SPS conference and the previous ones were absolutely wonderful, so you can imagine how much I am looking forward to it. The first contribution is a paper by Jakob Landwehr-Matlé, Kai Oppermann (both TU Chemnitz) and myself from our „Tech War“ project. Here’s the abstract: In the course of digitalisation, technology leadership has become a central dimension of the increasing geopolitical and geo-economic great power competition in the US-China-EU triangle. The securitisation of…
I’m pleased to announce the start of a new research project. Following up on our successful project on digital sovereignty narratives in Germany, Kai Oppermann and I want to extend this line of inquiry. Our initial project was mainly concerned with reconstructing how actors speak of digital sovereignty. We now move to a part of the question why they do it, focusing on the idea that there is some kind of international „tech war“ or innovation race going on. We are very grateful to the German Foundation for Peace Research for funding a one-year pilot project which we will use to collect…