How Technology Transforms Geopolitics
An incomplete list of 17 ways in which new technologies make the old rules matter less
YOU COULD DIE TOMORROW simply because the society you live in did not figure out how to deal with transformative technologies. And here is why and how.
The world could experience a major war or other disaster that directly affects your life and ability to survive, simply because of a disconnect between static institutions and technological dynamics.
When technologies change as profoundly as they currently do, they not only result in more capable versions of what we had before. Rather, they alter the way things work on a much more profound level. They cause transformations.
Because these transformations are often deceptively obscure and seemingly subtle, they are similar to tectonic plates. Like those, when they cross a stress threshold they can have sudden and dramatically violent consequences. Tech-driven changes cause such reactions because often they only seem incremental and linear but are exponential and disruptive.
Therefore, I call them “Techtonic Shifts.”
They affect your life, and also impact world politics, or as it frequently is labelled: geopolitics. Exponential technologies are remaking our world, sometimes within just a couple of election cycles. They re-define the inner workings of our societies and the power relationships between them.
Here are just 17 examples of their potential impact:
Satellite constellations can provide detailed monitoring of human activities, and enable ultra-fast communication, while overcoming borders.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can make autonomous weapons more effective than human operated ones, and factories more flexible.
Quantum technologies can break encryption but also secure communications and discover new fertilizers, better drugs, and new materials that rearrange our supply chains.
Microgrids and geothermal or solar energy production can create resilience against natural or man-made disasters and the systemwide breakdown of large grids.
Industry 4.0, additive manufacturing, and digital supply chains can reduce our need to ship semi-finished and finished goods.
eVehicles and batteries can shift dependencies and power from oil producers to lithium producers.
Blockchains, Metaverses, and Web3 can break down traditional borders between countries and even businesses.
The Internet of Things (IoT) and 6G can combine with AI and blockchains to change the way we move, produce, transport goods, and conduct commerce.
New fertilizers, genomics, and agricultural processes can change our societies’ food security and human health.
Digitization and the move of the majority of the economy into the digisphere can elicit new forms of dynamic organizations and self-organized communities.
Social media, gaming, and technology platforms can establish new kinds of global communities and power centers that cut across countries.
Virtual platforms can transcend classical systems for education and scientific research.
Digital money and cryptocurrencies can secure assets but also affect economic systems and political power.
Precision agriculture can establish food security and protect the environment.
Space technologies can enable new ways to generate energy and extract raw materials.
Virtual reality and digital twins can transcend traditional supply chains and the alter the very nature of work itself.
Healthcare and longevity technologies can enable and empower aging societies.
This list is not just incomplete. It also only scratches the surface. The reality is even more complex and disruptive. Most of the times, multiple technologies work together, enhancing their impact.
As a consequence, new weapons systems emerge, and new defenses against them. Borders break down, between organizations and nations. Legal systems and policing can no longer cope with increasingly complex mechanisms, and with the overwhelming data volume and the number of automated transactions. New mechanisms of interactions emerge, using different tools within novel kinds of communities. This leads to technology platforms, and the principles they operate on, dominating ever more of our world.
We cannot cope with the onslaught of these changes by tinkering with structures and strategies rooted in the industrial revolution and expanded on during the mid-20th century. Such attempts are hopelessly outgunned compared to the scale, flexibility, and raw innovative power of modern networks.
We must use 21st century tools to solve 21st century challenges and opportunities.
Understanding and Preparing for Tech-Induced Disruptions of the Global System
The big question is whether our institutions cope, or whether their inability to grasp the impact of tech-driven change increases the stress level of the global system to a degree that it then breaks and triggers social, political, and economic upheavals and catastrophes - or even war.
But faced with this question, we cannot afford to simply have such predictable catastrophes happen to us or to our world. This is not acceptable.
We must prepare for the future, and we can. Technological change disrupts everything but is not really imperceptible. It is our choice to engage, to learn and understand, to think and anticipate, and then to prepare and shape.
We can, and we must, do exactly that.
1 Trillion Times More Powerful AI: How Exponentially Changing Technologies Work
Computing power is doubling every two years, increasing 1000 fold over two decades.
Artificial intelligence algorithms have for a while been improving even by a factor of 10 ever year. Continuing this would mean they increase their capabilities by a factor of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 over these same 20 years. Even if this number would be overstated by a factor of one million, by 2040, AI would then still be one trillion times as powerful as in 2022. And if this pace would be overstated by a factor of one trillion, AI would still be one million times as powerful.
In the meantime, we are about to see the weaving of tens of trillions of sensors into the fabric of every aspect of our physical existence, connected at 6G hyper-speed to global digital platforms that near-instantaneously link everything via mesh networks and hundreds of thousands of satellites.
Please try to fully digest these last few sentences. In any way, I hope you will stay tuned because these facts WILL profoundly affect and alter your life. It is coming, whether you and I want it or not.
Even if the pace of these developments would significantly slow down, computing power, AI, IoT, 6G, and satellite constellations will continue to drive unprecedented technological advances. As I am writing this, well-funded teams of smart people are actively working on advancing and massively scaling satellite constellations, smart grids, quantum computing, additive manufacturing, new material development, nuclear fusion, digital twins, drones, drone swarms, precision architecture, fertilizer replacements, vertical farms, precision medicine, anti-aging therapies, space-based solar power, eVehicles, batteries, tiny sensors powered by ambient energy, moon bases, satellite constellations, virtual reality and holograms, blockchains, and metaverses. Governments are vested in all of this. Equally so, or possibly even more, private investors are committed to all of this, as well. And investors don’t like losing their money.
Each one of these technologies impacts geopolitics. This shifts power relations inside and between nations. And overall, it not only transforms the “inter-national” system but even starts to transcend it because traditional concepts of borders and socio-economic structures do not matter as much as they used to.
Techtonic Worlds Analyzes Tech’s Impact on our World
If you are with me on this, then this specific “Techtonic Worlds” section of the newsletter is for you. I will keep describing the impact of the above technologies on our societies and on geopolitics. You do not need to be an expert in specific details of technologies. Rather, you must understand their most relevant concepts and implications. I will summarize and explain these.
Then you can take it from there. And hopefully, you engage and contribute your own observations and thought processes as well. After all, we are in this together.