Emerging Tech is the Future of War...on Human Freedom
The technologies meant for war between militaries are being used to surveil, control, and kill civilians...at home and abroad.
I just finished lecturing on “emerging technologies.” It’s a slice of my Intro to Security Studies course, which looks at contemporary policy issues (relating to war and peace) in light of the various ideas introduced in the first half of the course.1
Something about what my own lectures occlude bothers me.
Of course, I have to teach what exists, and what exists in security studies on the topic of emerging tech is overwhelmingly about “strategic stability”—factors that affect the risks of war or nuclear escalation among militaries doing terrible things to other societies and militaries.
It’s useful for some people to think about how drones, A.I., lasers, cyberattacks, hypersonic missiles, and the like affects strategic stability. We should want to know whether the spread of a certain technology makes our military strategies more prone toward catastrophe. Armed with such information, in theory, we might then be able to do something to not cause World War III.
And since what scholars have published is basically this kind of stuff, I have an obligation to teach the best of it…albeit with a critical eye.
But all of it imagines “the future of war” as being between militaries—something I was once paid to imagine but about which I have misgivings.
What nothing in this genre imagines is how these same technological developments can be—and are being—used against citizens, immigrants, and oppressed peoples in myriad contexts.
Our national security states do not have adequate separation from our police states. And both increasingly rely on technology-based surveillance to perpetuate systems of violence—against foreign militaries, but also against fellow human beings.