Technological progress drives history. The fact that the current technological revolution will change the world is indisputable. The possibilities created by the digital technologies and the Internet were the first impulse to activate our imagination. Years ago, Jeremy Rifkin added renewable energy to the Internet as a factor of change. New sources of energy were supposed to democratize energy, transform the economy, society and politics. The democratization of energy was supposed to reorganize power. The power was to be arranged horizontally. Rifkin introduced the term “lateral power”. Capitalism would function in a distributed manner. Mastodon economic and political entities would die out. The tyranny of property would be replaced by the right of access. The economy would operate on a sharing basis. Intellectual property law would cease to apply. Who wouldn’t want that. Another reason to support the successful implementation of the ambitious goals of “Fit for 55”?
What stirred our imagination even more emotionally was the use of the possibilities of “big data”. The society would receive tools to predict the future and shape it with the help of ready-made algorithms.
Today we have entered an even higher level of revolution – the level related to artificial intelligence. Already Hawking announced that the development of artificial intelligence would mean the end of the human race. Decades ago, Fukuyama wanted to describe a “post-human civilization.” Kurzweil predicted that around 2040, a “singularity” resulting from the organic combination of artificial and human intelligence would begin to take over the world. Even if we assume that the law of prediction says that everything will happen later and differently than we plan, Kurzweil’s vision forces us to reflect seriuosly about it.
Today, the studies of the effects of the digital revolution, big data and artificial intelligence in relation to international relations focus on the military use of new technologies. Digital tools are already being used to wage hybrid warfare. Automation of target selection, massive use of unmanned ships and vehicles, remote paralysis of management networks and key infrastructure have become the basic elements of the art of war. Added to this are new possibilities of biophysical improvement of a soldier’s combat abilities.
In the military, A.I.-infused systems can speed up the tempo of battlefield decisions to such a degree that they create entirely new risks of accidental strikes, or decisions made on misleading or deliberately false alerts of incoming attacks.
According to Eric Schmidt: „A core problem with A.I. in the military and in national security is how do you defend against attacks that are faster than human decision-making, and I think that issue is unresolved,” “In other words, the missile is coming in so fast that there has to be an automatic response. What happens if it’s a false signal?”
As described in a story published in the New York Times in 2023, generative A.I. threatens to push countries toward faster decision-making.
This speaks clear for the need to open a new chapter in arms control focused on artificial intelligence in warfare. Nothing of this sort is happening yet.
And in the meantime, digital technologies are used aggressively to undermine other countries and societies. They are used to influence election results and public sentiment. Worst of all, these technologies are being used for authoritarian control over their own societies. The Chinese system of social credit shows that there is something to be afraid of.
Western prophets of the impact of the technological revolution on the world have been describing the future in dystopian colors for years. Some, like Robert Gordon once, predict a developmental stagnation, a “post-growth economy”. Already today, artificial intelligence is seen as a factor in the decline of many areas of the economy, a source of mass unemployment, lowering the level of wages, and increasing social inequalities. Piketty scared us enough a few years ago with the prospect of a rentier world in which rent from accumulated wealth, rather than profit and work, becomes the ticket to prosperity. Tyler Cowen, while describing the “post-work society”, based on the tyranny of competence, treats most of society as redundant people, filling their time with socially completely unproductive activities. Fukuyama heralded new class divisions, big cracks in the criterion of justice, related to access to technologies that prolong life.
What is comforting is the fact that life brings adjustments to the visions of the future drawn up a decade ago. Despite predictions, digital technologies give growth, inequalities do not increase, the concept of “redundancy” is highly relative.
Western researchers of the future, even if they promise that new technologies will ensure human health, extend their life incredibly to the limit of immortality, fill them with happiness (like Huxley’s pills) and provide them with superhuman abilities, they will always find a deficiency somewhere. Like Harari, who scared us that we would pay for all these gains with the loss of the highest good of man: the loss of personal freedom. Algorithms will anticipate, shape and satisfy all our needs. We will become puppets in the theater of digital dictatorships.
Slawoj Żiżek advised, however, not to treat freedom as an absolute. He wrote that freedom is a weak foundation for capitalism in the West and a hollow one. Freedom exists in a twisted way in the West we are forced to make “free” choices.
Westerners are running away from freedom. Will they be ready to sacrifice it in the name of higher values? As for higher values, they are now willing to sacrifice their level of prosperity for the sake of clean environment. The prophecy of consumer amok has not come true. A clean and rich natural environment turned out to be a more important goal for many Westerners (especially young people) than consumption. They don’t want to drive cars, eat meat, fly on planes because it’s bad for the climate.
Interestingly, the descriptions of the future in China and other Asian countries, even in science fiction literature, are much more pink. In the West, dystopias are more attuned to the general mood of society. Aging societies are full of fatigue and fear, as Bauman and others have long described in detail. If there are utopian notes, they are present in the nostalgic version as retrotopia.
A society of new divisions, new social conflicts will have to rebuild existing institutions, including the state and management mechanisms, political institutions. Will we have political parties? Will the parliament in the form in which it was formed three hundred years ago make sense at all, will elections based on political rivalry make sense?
And if the mechanisms of functioning of social and political life within the traditionally understood countries are rearranged, what will international coexistence look like in the era that Ayesha and Parag Khanna dubbed Pax Technologica a decade ago? Will the states survive it at all? In the title of the post, I gave a few alternative terms for the new shape of the order. Pax post-humana is the closest to me.
The promise of a good future in international relations rests on several pillars.
Firstly, according to many forecasts, space will lose importance, and with it the territory and the imperative of control over it. Physical resources will no longer be the key to wealth. The physical “Lebensraum” will no longer be the key to social happiness. So the main causes of conflicts and wars will disappear.
Second, power will no longer matter. It will be dispersed. The economy and politics will be dominated by micropowers (as Moises Noam announced). Dominations and hierarchies will be replaced by networks. The argument of force won’t work.
Third, rationality will prevail in political decisions. Artificial intelligence will eliminate emotions from the decision-making process, especially the bad emotions, such as anger, fear, hatred, and the desire for revenge. In international relations, the dictate of honor and the compulsion to come out of a dispute “saving face” will disappear. Whether good emotions, such as empathy and solidarity, can be smuggled into machine algorithms is a questionable matter. Because machines don’t seem to distinguish between good and bad emotions. But maybe these good emotions will somehow be saved. However, one needs to get used to the fact that political messages will resemble Captain Spock’s monologues from Star Trek.
Fourth, violence as a systemic problem will disappear. Rationalization of political behavior will make the use of force illogical and harmful to all parties to the conflict of interest. Violence will no longer pay off. Although, Bauman claimed that as long as there is coercion, there will be a place for violence. But, as the experience of the European Union shows, there is no need to use the argument of tanks to enforce the judgments of the European Court of Justice or the directives of the European Commission.
Fifth, the community will be governed by laws, not by imposed morality. Artificial intelligence cannot think in moral terms. But the human individual will not cease to be a moral being. But finally, it will free itself from the ballast of the norms of collective correctness.
Sixth, the culture of cooperation and mutual benefit will prevail. It will not have to be supervised by the institutions of a world state or nation states (whatever happens to them). People will stop seeing migration as the only way to ensure a decent life.
This list of good changes can be continued. And one can even create a catalog of the commandments of a new techno-utopian religion in international relations.
However, it doesn’t make much sense. First of all, because we are unable as yet to create a common route leading us to fulfill this promise. The new reality of Pax Technologica cannot count on catalytic actions from the existing structures and institutions. It will arise spontaneously, often coming into a clash with them.
The transition strategy has not yet been presented convincingly by anyone. And it must come up with ideas for solving a few problems that are at least unsolvable in today’s conditions.
First, it must show how to rid the world of nuclear weapons. As long as these weapons exist, there will always be a risk that we will never reach the Pax Post-humana. And we will not get rid of these weapons (despite the beautiful visions of President Obama from the beginning of his presidency) as long as the view is so strong that it is thanks to the existence of nuclear weapons that the world has not plunged into a global war of all against all during the Cold War and to the present. We will not get rid of them as long as one can see nukes as the only solid guarantee of one’s own safety and even existence. Because not only North Korea, but also Russia think so, and over time China will think so if it continues its course of confrontation with the West.
Secondly, the transition strategy must answer the question of how to ensure balance in the natural environment, prevent its degradation and depletion of natural resources necessary to ensure a dignified life for a civilization which in a few years or so will reach its maximum level from the point of view of the Earth’s capacity to sustain its functioning. In few decades not centuries, there will be no more oil and gas, no reserves of farmland and, above all, reservers of drinking water to meet the needs of a population of ten billion. Of course, technology will help. But the turbulence caused by uncontrolled climate change can rock the entire system of international relations, it can divide and barbarize the world.
At this point, the international community managed to agree on the objective of action (to stop the temperature increase by no more than 2 degrees Celsius, and if possible, by 1.5 degrees) and the negotiated procedure (COP), but the commitments made by the states do not fully and, worst of all, despite their legally binding nature, they are quite soft, because they do not impose any sanctions. Maybe the goal will be achieved, but what if not? We will be facing economic shocks, population displacements, the disappearance of a dozen or so island states from the world map. Will the artificial intelligence revolution help to deal with this challenge? Some say yes. No hard evidence yet.
Thirdly, we must have guarantees to ensure the internal cohesion of our societies in the face of rapid technological change. There will be major changes in the structure of the workforce. This will be accompanied by demographic changes, which may cause not only a crisis in pension systems. The decline in birth rate will affect not only the West or China. Sub-Saharan Africa will resist it the longest. But until the demographic situation stabilizes, the problem of migration and tensions over income inequality will deepen. Now the so-called migration overhang (the number of potential migrants) exceeds one billion people, while almost three hundred million people in the world are migrants already. Will it grow? Because COVID-19 gave only a temporary weakening of the migration pressure.
Most analysts of the future are reassured that there will be no social revolutions in the world. There will be no eruption of anger comparable to the French Revolution of 1789, and even more so the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Anger dissipates. As predicted by Sloterdijk, anger stopped heating up social emotions. Protest movements in the West after the 2008 crisis turned out to be ephemeral. Even the recent mass protests in France over the pension reform are a purely television spectacle for the rest of the world. Here and there dictatorships can fall, here and there generals will seize power, here and there a civil war can lead to the disintegration of a state. But a revolt of the masses on a general scale is not on the horizon.
Fortunately, there is no ideology that could fuel the revolt. And when artificial intelligence takes over the world, there will simply be no room for ideology (already unprecedentedly shrunk today anyway).
Will there be more serious tensions against the background of the social effects of artificial intelligence? Rather doubtful. Which by no means should demobilize the public and politicians in developing the rules for the use of artificial intelligence.
Fourth, we should have safeguards for a smooth course of cultural convergence in the world. Fortunately, Huntington’s prophecy of civilization wars has come to naught. The sectarian confrontation in the world is likely to lose its intensity. The main argument is the progressive secularization of societies. No one seems to be able to resist it, not even Islamic countries. Culture wars within societies may temporarily intensify. Today, such a perspective in the United States is disturbing (the division on the background of the right to abortion and not only). In some countries, some political forces saw the culture war as a way to achieve electoral successes (in Poland, Hungary), or even to legitimize authoritarian power (Russia).
In international politics, this aspect is marginalized. Perhaps rightly so. Perhaps it is possible to provide societies with a sense of cultural security without resorting to international regulations.
From the above review, it appears that the most important threat to the Pax Post-humana would be nuclear war. And of course, the impact of a large meteorite (attack from an extraterrestrial civilization in the foreseeable future is excluded). Jacques Attali once proposed the creation of a global agency tasked with early detection and prevention of similar threats. Nobody took him seriously. And still today nobody does not take him seriously. In this way, we agree to rely on the technological power of the United States. Without it, the world will not be able to cope with the meteorite threat (even China or Russia). A world without the US will not be able to cope with the nuclear threat either.
Without the US, the world will not go far in the right direction. Really?
