What AI and new technologies can do for diplomacy
The twenty-first century has experienced a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” marked by rapid advances in technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI). Artificial intelligence, for example — once an arcane branch of computer science research — today finds itself in everyday parlance.
With rapid progress, we must maintain a healthy skepticism without being blinded by it. There are genuine and merited concerns about how these technologies will impact human societies in decades to come, yet the advances also come with tangible benefits. Think about getting advance traffic warnings so you take a different route, minute-by-minute weather forecasts, cheaper and easily accessible airline tickets and insurance policies, or setting an alarm by simply speaking to your phone, to name a few.
Digital advances are also affecting international affairs, including diplomacy and peace efforts. The United Nations has sought to be at the forefront of efforts to apply technology in peacemaking, including using mapping technologies to support ceasefire monitoring, AI-assisted digital dialogues for inclusion, or letting the Security Council visit Colombia through virtual reality to get closer to issues on the ground.
How can diplomatic actors harness the boundless opportunities offered by emerging technologies in an equitable and fair manner?
For a start, technological innovation requires broad and cohesive action, as the Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation attests. More and more UN Member States are seeking to cooperate on artificial intelligence issues, with the Global Partnership for Artificial Intelligence being but one example. If we are to move the needle at all on global challenges such as socioeconomic inequality, sustainable peace, and climate change, it will be through recognizing that new technologies must be part of a path toward progress. The UN Secretary-General’s report on Our Common Agenda also stresses this point.
As such, what kinds of technologies are being adopted by foreign ministries, and which are we likely to see more of in the future?
Emerging Technologies in Peace and Diplomacy — Four Trends
1. Computational Political Analysis
Researchers are turning to big data analytics of news media to understand trends in peace and conflict. Foreign ministries are employing frontier technologies for complex political analysis. One example is AI-assisted media monitoring, or “social listening,” which involves identifying how their country is perceived on social media and foreign news outlets. The Swedish MFA, through its affiliate Swedish Institute, gathers knowledge about Sweden’s public image and thematic engagement on issues such as climate change and development. The United States’ Department of State has made the use of real-time data a strategic goal in its current data strategy, and it is only a matter of time before others follow suit.
Where should foreign ministries start in seeking to increase computing capacities for use in political analysis? With open-source tools that are already free and available. Google’s GDELT, for instance, is a real-time, automated data platform that collects broadcast, print, and web news worldwide from over 100 languages. While the abundance of existing solutions can be puzzling at first sight, investing time in what existing tools may yield great results.
2. Decoding Disinformation Campaigns
Disinformation remains a growing and persistent threat to international cooperation and solidarity. Through Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods, the intersection between artificial intelligence and language, the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) has developed the digital application Tanbih. This AI-empowered news aggregator detects stance, bias, and propaganda throughout major news outlets. The purpose of Tanbih, as explained by its project lead, Dr. Preslav Nakov, is to:
“Limit the impact of disinformation, propaganda, and media bias by making users aware of what they are reading, thus promoting media literacy and critical thinking as the best way to address these issues. We are optimistic that such media literacy tools will help educate people, and eventually, we will see disinformation go the way of spam: not entirely eliminated but becoming largely irrelevant.”
Disinformation remains a core challenge for governmental actors. While there exist methods to single out Twitter “bots” — pre-programmed accounts used in disinformation dissemination — many officials, including in foreign ministries rely on human fact-checking methods that rarely match the levels of disinformation that exist.
However, governments are keenly aware of the threats that disinformation poses to domestic political processes. The French government, for instance, has included in its Disinfo toolbox the machine learning-based classifier Bot Finder, which is trained to detect the behavior of suspicious Twitter accounts to counter disinformation narratives.
3. Machine Learning for Diplomatic Negotiations
Computer-assisted game theory, a set of mathematical models widely applied in economics, is another field being applied to the field of strategic decision-making. For example, Professors Micheline Calmy-Rey (who served twice as President of Switzerland) and Michael Ambühl at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH Zürich) are through the Lab for Science in Diplomacy (SiDLab) looking into ways to integrate machine learning with game theory to see how quantitative methods can inform the choice of strategy in international negotiations.
Professor Ambühl believes that AI tools can support diplomatic efforts in the future but “urges caution”, fearing that due to a lack of understanding, “states will ascribe greater importance to emerging technologies than these technologies might actually have.”
When interviewed for this article, Ambühl noted:
“We might need to distinguish between those negotiations that have some standardization or degrees of repetitiveness — such as free trade and double taxation agreements or investment Protection Agreements — and those negotiations that deal with complex issues, such as Brexit or the current nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1. In the former category of negotiations, the use of AI would be quite conceivable; in the latter, probably not.”
The size of the diplomatic corps in bilateral and multilateral negotiations is often proportional to the political and economic resources of different countries. There is no doubt that with unequal access, AI-based decision-making tools may further existing power divides. However, if organizations help develop such tools for the use of less-endowed foreign ministries, the latter may be able to compensate for the lack of human resources to attend diplomatic summits and gatherings that require technical expertise across portfolios. Moreover, the use of AI agents that help human negotiators gather information on policy stances in diplomatic negotiations will likely enhance the speed and scale at which bilateral agreements are made.
4. Quantum Computing
Quantum computing will — for specific, practical applications — significantly outperform modern computers. Even the best cybersecurity systems would struggle in the face of malignant actors at quantum speeds. When asked about emerging technologies in diplomacy for this article, Associate Professor Corneliu Bjola at the University of Oxford pointed to a growing fear that quantum computing will, over time, render current encryption techniques obsolete. A scenario in which some governments develop an ability to apply quantum computing capacities for adversarial purposes would pose a high risk to confidentiality, a sine qua non of large parts of diplomatic practices. Foreign offices no longer considering their internal communication as safe from foreign intrusion would be a gamechanger in the conduct of international affairs.
However, developing and scaling up quantum supercomputer capacities is highly costly and resource-intensive, and research is currently only conducted by a few multilateral technology companies. These companies are responsible for ensuring that the potential abilities to invest in emerging technologies are used equitably and do not widen existing digital divides.
The opposite might also be the case: the current digital divide grows even larger. The UN Secretary-General has made it clear that advanced technologies like “quantum computing incur significant new risks and can affect conflict dynamics for the worse.”
So, What Does the Future Look Like?
UN Member States remain somewhat leery toward AI-based solutions in policy planning and decision-making. When asked what discussions on these technologies should look like in the context multilateral diplomacy, one source suggested that,
“…the discussion [should] revolve around questions of verifiability and ethics. For example, can we trust artificial intelligence to make accurate predictions or decisions, and what level of verifiability and transparency will be sufficient to achieve this trust? Furthermore, should we be outsourcing decision making to an algorithm, and if so, to what extent?”
Yet, the future of diplomacy will be computational. While the human touch will not be replaced — as it remains essential — new technologies will play an increasing role in diplomatic conduct. Herein lies a paradox: if governments choose not to invest in digital literacy of new technologies, they will also be less able to address the legitimate concerns of how some of them are being used. As such, in order to generate the shifts in norms we need for foreign ministries to properly harness new technologies, storytelling and knowledge-dissemination (e.g. explainability) are vital.
Another consideration is that most algorithmic technologies are developed in spaces inaccessible to public scrutiny. This gives rise to governments considering unilateral R&D into emerging technologies, especially if conducted by great powers, can be seen as a potential security threat. This perception highlights the importance of governments discussing the role of emerging technologies in open, diplomatic forums and of finding space for multilateral solutions to growing suspicion among UN Member States regarding the unequal development of AI capacities.
While the United Nations seeks to democratize access to new technologies, and governments to address issues such as technology gaps, technology companies cannot absolve themselves of the ethical implications that lie in emerging technologies. Mitigating algorithmic bias is essential. Moreover, automating certain capacities — such as that of taking lives — should be outright banned.
On the international stage, governments can take several steps to minimize the risks that technology gaps pose to multilateral cooperation. The first is to increase data literacy and knowledge about emerging technologies among Member States. The second is to deliberate openly about how emerging technologies may widen existing digital divides. The third, and perhaps most important, is to change mindsets and work to find common ground on the benefits, risks and impacts of emerging technologies.
About the author: Kyrre Berland is a consultant to the DPPA Innovation Cell. He explores new approaches and technologies to conflict prevention using machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). Kyrre has a background in law and conflict studies and has worked in the peacebuilding, human rights, and migration sectors.
“Futuring Peace” is an online magazine published by the Innovation Cell of the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (UN DPPA). We explore cross-cutting approaches to conflict prevention, peacemaking and peacebuilding for a more peaceful future worldwide.
