Loss of tech leadership causes extinction – uncontrolled risks from cause rapid shifts in strategic stability and misuse. American dominance is key.

The system must also be adapted to deal with new issues that were not envisioned when the existing order was designed. Foremost among these issues is emerging and disruptive technology, including AI, additive manufacturing (or 3D printing), quantum computing, genetic engineering, robotics, directed energy, the Internet of things (IOT), 5G, space, cyber, and many others. Like other disruptive technologies before them, these innovations promise great benefits, but also carry serious downside risks. For example, AI is already resulting in massive efficiencies and cost savings in the private sector. Routine tasks and other more complicated jobs, such as radiology, are already being automated. In the future, autonomous weapons systems may go to war against each other as human soldiers remain out of harm’s way.

Yet, AI is also transforming economies and societies, and generating new security challenges. Automation will lead to widespread unemployment. The final realization of driverless cars, for example, will put out of work millions of taxi, Uber, and long-haul truck drivers. Populist movements in the West have been driven by those disaffected by globalization and technology, and mass unemployment caused by automation will further grow those ranks and provide new fuel to grievance politics. Moreover, some fear that autonomous weapons systems will become “killer robots” that select and engage targets without human input, and could eventually turn on their creators, resulting in human extinction. The other technologies on this lisgt similarly balance great potential upside with great downside risk. 3D printing, for example, can be used to “make anything anywhere,” reducing costs for a wide range of manufactured goods and encouraging a return of local manufacturing industries.61 At the same time, advanced 3D printers can also be used by revisionist and rogue states to print component parts for advanced weapons systems or even WMD programs, spurring arms races and weapons proliferation.62 Genetic engineering can wipe out entire classes of disease through improved medicine, or wipe out entire classes of people through genetically engineered superbugs. Directed-energy missile defenses may defend against incoming missile attacks, while also undermining global strategic stability.

Perhaps the greatest risk to global strategic stability from new technology, however, comes from the risk that revisionist autocracies may win the new tech arms race. Throughout history, states that have dominated the commanding heights of technological progress have also dominated international relations. The United States has been the world’s innovation leader from Edison’s light bulb to nuclear weapons and the Internet. Accordingly, stability has been maintained in Europe and Asia for decades because the United States and its democratic allies possessed a favorable economic and military balance of power in those key regions. Many believe, however, that China may now have the lead in the new technologies of the twenty-first century, including AI, quantum, 5G, hypersonic missiles, and others. If China succeeds in mastering the technologies of the future before the democratic core, then this could lead to a drastic and rapid shift in the balance of power, upsetting global strategic stability, and the call for a democratic- led, rules-based system outlined in these pages.63

The United States and its democratic allies need to work with other major powers to develop a framework for harnessing emerging technology in a way that maximizes its upside potential, while mitigating against its downside risks, and also contributing to the maintenance of global stability. The existing international order contains a wide range of agreements for harnessing the technologies of the twentieth century, but they need to be updated for the twenty-first century. The world needs an entire new set of arms-control, nonproliferation, export-control, and other agreements to exploit new technology while mitigating downside risk. These agreements should seek to maintain global strategic stability among the major powers, and prevent the proliferation of dangerous weapons systems to hostile and revisionist states.