New ZHET Paper: Managing the risks and rewards of emerging and converging technologies: International cooperation, national policy and the role of the individual
ICT4Peace and ZHET are pleased to announce the publication of a new paper written by Regina Surber, Scientific Advisor to the ICT4Peace Foundation and Zurich Hub for Ethics and Technology (ZHET).
The paper is a response to the lack of farsightedness of existing approaches to handle the risks and challenges of new technologies. It highlights three crucial aspects of the emerging technologies landscape which must be addressed by the global community in order for related policies to be effective and sustainable:
(1) Different emerging technologies, such as quantum computing, additive manufacturing, or biotechnology, may converge into a new weapons landscape, which requires a breaking-up of the traditional weapons ‘silos’ of nuclear weapons, cyber-weapons/-attacks, biological weapons, or, more recently, LAWS (Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems).
(2) Emerging technologies, such as LAWS, do not only have an effect on the individual and society during armed conflict but importantly also outside of war scenarios. These technologies raise broader social and human rights concerns relating to (data) privacy, bias and fairness, justice, and even existential risks for humanity. These concerns are prevalent independent of armed conflict. The paper highlights four of those highly transformative aspects: the new information landscape, the growing irrelevance of the human behind the data, life-enhancement technologies, and how biomedicine is slowly creating a new understanding of human health.
(3) The current and highly important UN GGE’s (Governmental Group of Experts) debate on emerging technologies in the field of LAWS focuses on peace and security implications of those developments for traditional territorial state sovereignty. However, the challenges arising from emerging technologies do not fit within our traditional concept of borders and state sovereignty and do not only affect the state as a collective construct. The challenges arising from emerging technologies are also inherently local and citizen-based, precisely because they affect an individual’s data security, privacy, autonomy, or the (truth or falsehood of) information available. Therefore, it is key to bring individual human beings back into the epicenter of security concerns.
The changing human and social environment resulting from our never-ending curiosity and obsession with new tools, requires a rethinking and a reshaping of traditional architectures both at the level of international arms control and disarmament, as well as at the level of national governance. Further, they require an integration of early and continous ethical training into educational systems around the globe.
The paper can be downloaded here.
Please find here Regina’s earlier publication on AI, Leathal Autonomous Weapons (LAWS) and Peace Time Threats.
Regina Surber and Daniel Stauffacher published the following guest commentary in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ)on 19 September 2018.
Regina Surber gave a lecture on Autonomous Intelligent Software Agents, LAWS and Peace-Time Threats on 16 January 2017 at the SwissCognitive Tank hosted by Ringier, Zurich. The full lecture can be viewed on Youtube here.