The era of ‘geotechnology’

At last month’s World AI Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in Shanghai, China’s President Xi noted that "artificial intelligence (AI) development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation".  

Although his speech anchored around the importance of collaboration and openness, we are now undoubtedly in an era of “geotechnology” where national tech priorities may come to trump international technology collaboration.  

This is a time in which control of critical minerals, internet connectivity, and technology components as well as technology talent could come to shape the global order.  

Technology has long intersected with geopolitics.  

But the depth of national investment, the pace of deals and declarations, and the dependency on a handful of companies, is unprecedented. And these are no longer IT, digital, or tech questions – ones that can be siloed to Ministers of Digital or Infocomm Technology (ICT) Councils.  

These priorities need to be in the in-trays (or perhaps inboxes) of national leaders.  

Leaders need to engage with three geotechnology priorities: sovereignty, strategy, and survival. 

More than owning the technology 

Sovereignty is the word of the moment – from Delhi, to Dhaka, Dubai, and Dar es Salaam.  

How can countries build their own AI or digital infrastructure, or increase their domestic AI compute power or talent pool? 

However, sovereignty is about more than technology components or data centre investments. It is about ensuring that countries understand – and can shape – their respective technology trajectories.  

Sovereignty is also about reaffirming the importance of government.  

At the India AI Impact Summit in February, French President Macron noted that "Big Tech got even bigger" in the past year. Although the private sector has been an essential player in the AI revolution, when the data centre spend of a handful of companies is more than the entire GDP of some countries in Asia – the asymmetry between public and private efforts is stark.  

Governments need to have agency. They need to empower their people (and keep them safe) and ensure that technology disruption doesn’t come at the expense of trust, institutions, and civic life.  

Fundamentally, governments – not the private sector - need to be defining the direction and vision for how technology will drive national growth and development.  

Governments need to identify what tech means to them 

This direction is strategy. From e-commerce to ridesharing (and soon, potentially, drones and driverless vehicles) technology is something that has “happened” to countries, cities, and communities. Instead of true consideration of what 21st century digital societies and economies – governments and institutions – should and could look like.

We need leaders to engage more with the governance of technology. This is not just about regulation but about shaping institutional and national cultures of innovation.

For emerging economies, this has become an urgent consideration as AI may decimate traditional development pathways, including outsourcing and professional services, which have been crucial for countries to graduate to higher-income status. 

In a global, complex, and increasingly fractious and fragmented, technology landscape, strategy may also be about specialising and driving comparative advantages.  

This could be about figuring out the above institutional architecture. Or it could come from eschewing the high-compute pathway and focusing on different initiatives. Building an agricultural small-language model or becoming a HealthTech hub, for instance.  

Opportunity cost is real. And strategy is as much about saying ‘yes’ to technology priorities as it is about having leaders and institutions empowered to say ‘no’ to chasing global trends. 

Engaging with tech may also be a question of survival 

Finally, for some contexts, the geotechnology era will be one of survival.

How to avoid being subjugated to technologies, standards, and rules defined elsewhere (becoming a technology taker, as opposed to a maker or shaper)?  

And how to ensure that international technology companies have a positive domestic impact, and don’t extract national data or value? 

As well as tackling the reality that in some settings core public responsibilities, from connectivity to citizen engagement, have now become the domain of these same companies. With the delivery of public services, voting, and last-mile internet now dependent on Big Tech benevolence or philanthropic funding. 

Survival is also about tackling technology’s consequences. Strengthening the social fabric, as digital increasingly focuses on personalisation at the expense of the whole.  

Responding to technology-turbocharged disinformation, and technology-enabled violence. Perhaps even building in friction to demonstrate that humans are still ‘in the lead’ and not solely (and sometimes, not even) just ‘in-the-loop’. And protecting and privileging the norms, culture, identity, and heritage that make countries and communities unique.  

Technology has long prompted these deliberations, but the pace and scale of AI has amplified them. And AI technologies have also played a role. As predictive models trained on (largely, Western) data, we are creating a world of the average – smoothing-out outliers in the data to refine the AI models that will drive our public and private services.  

But we don’t want the mean, we want the messy. Human ingenuity, talent, and nuance need to be the foundation of the 21st century.  

How to move forward 

The global community is at a geotechnology crossroad.  

Countries could continue to put up the digital walls, double-down on fragmentation, and see sovereignty as sacrosanct and a zero-sum game. Or countries could chart their own pathway, but in an open digital community.  

And this diversity of pathways will lead to more and better innovation.  

Silicon Valley has been impactful. But Chile’s decade-long Chilecon Valley efforts have also had important success. Similarly, the Kenyan Silicon Savannah has seen citizens embrace mobile payments over a decade ahead of the US West Coast.  

In this geotechnology era, countries and communities need to have the space and confidence to identify and hone these pathways. And although AI is accelerating some of the challenges and concerns discussed here, the unprecedented focus and attention it is garnering from national leaders also makes it an important inflection point.  

To borrow Mark Carney’s phrasing from a third major international summit this year – Davos, in January - AI can be considered a “rupture and not a transition". But this rupture could be one where geotechnology is shaped into a force of global collaboration and not solely one of competition. And one where the ‘middle powers’ – and others - could also shape the direction.  

Technology has enormous power and potential, but everyone needs to be included. And no country, context, or community can be left behind. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------- 

The author is an Asia Global Fellow - a Hong Kong-based programme that develops future leaders - exploring how technology is becoming an increasingly important geopolitical priority. He has also previously worked at the United Nations Development Programme, advising national leaders and senior government officials around the world on digital, technology and innovation.