Kommentar |
In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies have become a central concern of global governance. On the one hand, these transformative technologies promise to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, ranging from famines and global pandemics to the catastrophic impacts of climate change. At the same time, the rapid, unconstrained development of these technologies is said to pose risks in itself—in the worst case, an existential threat for humanity. Against this background, there is now widespread consensus on the need for global governance arrangements that maximize the benefits of emerging technologies while minimizing their potentially harmful impacts. But what can and should emerging technologies governance look like at the transnational level? Can AI, for instance, be governed like any other technology, or are new approaches needed? And can meaningful cooperation take place despite a nascent geopolitical technology competition? This course explores these questions by drawing on International Relations (IR) theory and the literature on global governance more broadly. Its goal is twofold: First, to equip students with foundational knowledge about key emerging technologies, in particular AI, and the risks associated with them; second, to help students shed light on these technologies’ political implications through the application of concepts and theories to concrete case studies. The course, offered as a block seminar, will be divided into two main parts. During the first part, we will critically engage with the concept of an ‘emerging technology’ and jointly explore both the history and present state of several technological fields, including AI, nanotechnology, and quantum computing. We will also discuss why these technologies might be problematic and why governance at the transnational level might be needed in the first place. In the second part, we will shift our focus to the global governance of emerging technologies. Here, we will survey theories and concepts from IR and apply them to a selected number of case studies. The goal here is to critically assess these theories’ potential for generating insights into the specific challenges posed by AI and other emerging technologies. |