AI Could Bring a ‘New Wave of Globalization’—and Security Risks

Daniel Needham: Is there any sort of consensus view out there that you disagree with or something that you think is relatively important in geopolitics that is not getting enough attention and that consensus just isn’t weighting it heavily enough?

Ian Bremmer: I think there’s a big one, which is consensus is that industrial policy and subsidies, as well as politics, are leading toward the US-China Cold War, and they are reducing the prospects of globalization medium term. I strongly disagree with that. I disagree with that because the Americans are by far the most important driver of artificial intelligence. The Chinese are by far the most important driver of transition energy, and I see those two things as the most important technological drivers of wealth, innovation, efficiency, and productivity in the world, but you need both. The Americans can say we all have to drive really bad, really inefficient EVs, but everyone else is going to work with the Chinese. The Chinese can tell their citizens you guys can’t use American AI, and we’re not going to let you have access to chatbots, but everyone else is going to. What I see is actually the most important. We’ve got these two incredible drivers of what’s going to be massive new capitalization and investment, and it turns out that the rest of the world is going to be more integrated with both the United States and China. I think for me that’s a real silver lining, and it allows a new wave of globalization to develop even though the geopolitics are truly problematic.

Needham: For that to be successful, do you need to have a bipolar sort of security order? Or can that still happen under the US being the big driver of global security?

Bremmer: I don’t think we’re heading to a bipolar security order. Right now, we have a unipolar security order. The Americans are the only country in the world that can project military strength globally. If that changes in the near term, it is probably not because it becomes bipolar. It is probably because the diffusion of artificial intelligence means that the level of sovereignty and control of the United States over national security just completely erodes. It’s not going to be two actors, it’s going to be thousands of actors. That is a major, major challenge. The Americans put hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars into legacy systems like submarines, and within three to five years no one working on submarines thinks they’re going to be useful because the seas are going to be made transparent by AI. So, you take a major component of American nuclear deterrence that you can’t change because these projects take decades to actually ramp up, and suddenly it’s irrelevant. What happens if that happens across the board? And suddenly private sector corporations, actors, and small governments just have complete ability to have asymmetric control in escalation vis-à-vis the United States. That’s absolutely plausible. China would be one of them. But it’s not going to be just China, it’s going to be everybody. That’s a very destabilizing potential threat.

Needham: Well, hopefully, we don’t end up there.

Bremmer: I hope not. But we don’t know. We just don’t know. It’s moving too fast.

Needham: As you said, it’s not what you want to happen. It’s what you think is going to happen based off analysis.