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July 20, 2024 06:31 PM IST
This paper is written by Stephanie Dipvene.
Over the past 30 years, digital innovation has been subject to divergent views on whether technology is emancipatory or benefits those with political and/or economic power. In the context of innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) in the early 2020s, this brief tackles the question: what is new about who exercises power over whom in the digital age? It focuses on the power of states in relation to both citizens and territory, and outlines four areas where fundamental changes are taking place in the exercise and contestation of power: (i) the state’s new reliance on tech firms; (ii) the digitisation of citizenship; (iii) preoccupation with the possibility of total surveillance; and (iv) new concerns and claims for territorial governance.
By the end of 2023, it was clear that the world was moving towards a digital age, where information in the form of digital data forms the basis of social, economic and political activities and decision-making. The public launch of ChatGPT a year ago, through which AI has been shown to generate human-like conversational text, resulted in an explosion of interest in the possibilities for AI to transform human activities – from the nature of work, to fraud, to geopolitical competition. While other technological innovations may still be more distant, such as the promise of quantum computing, their potential future uses are nonetheless becoming more imaginative.
The ‘digital age’ raises existential concerns that digital technology may surpass human performance and control, or that Big Tech will become a ‘new demon’ that will challenge state sovereignty. However, such a focus hides the continuing limitations of technological use. For example, generative AI relies on physical infrastructure and energy for complex technological processing, which remains a barrier for many states.
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This paper is written by Stephanie Dipvene.
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