From Substitution to Augmentation: Rethinking AI in Warfare
Roughly two thousand years ago, the full combat load of a Roman legionary weighed approximately 100 pounds (45 kg). Remarkably, modern militaries exhibit a similar pattern. U.S. Army soldiers still carry around 45 kg in full combat gear, while South…
Industrial Policy vs. Digital Reality: How Data, Not Labor, Is Rebuilding the Rust Belt
This Palantir advertisement, displayed at the Detroit airport—a symbolic and literal hub of U.S. industrial manufacturing—makes a highly strategic and ideologically charged claim: “Palantir is Reindustrializing America’s Manufacturing.” The ad visually juxtaposes sleek, robotic car manufacturing lines with logos of…
New Book: Declaring Independence in Cyberspace
What is the role of the state in the governance of global cyberspace? For the past 25 years, that problem has led to conflict, negotiation and governance innovations. A new book by Milton Mueller now covers a critical part of…
Has the IGF lost the Plot?
The UN Internet Governance Forum will be held June 22-27 in Olso, Norway. The Program Committee for the conference, known as the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG), released its selection of workshops for the 2025 IGF. The number of workshops was…
Unpacking US-China “Decoupling” in AI
This is a guest blog from two University of Manchester (UK) doctoral students involved in researching the causal mechanisms linking policy interventions to decoupling outcomes, with implications for innovation ecosystems and global governance. Earlier this year, the release of DeepSeek—an…
“Indigenous” Web Browsers in India: Who Benefits?
Across all three terms, the Modi government has tried to position India as a global technology hub. The state’s strategy involves pursuing self-reliance or “Atma Nirbharta.” The self-reliance strategy is being taken forward through a two-pronged approach — reducing the…
OpenAI’s manifesto: Neo-mercantilism Enters Global AI Governance
It was probably inevitable, given the current world situation. In a filing with the US Office of Science and Technology Policy for the Trump administration’s “AI Action Plan,” OpenAI played the geopolitical card, urging the U.S. government to ban its…
DeepSeek Says “Xi Jinping is a Dictator”
In last week’s blog post, The Frontier Illusion: Rethinking DeepSeek’s AI Threat, I discussed Cisco’s safety test on DeepSeek R1, which revealed the model’s inability to filter out socially unacceptable content, including cybercrime, harassment (bullying), chemical and biological weapons, and…
The Frontier Illusion: Rethinking DeepSeek’s AI Threat
The Frontier Illusion: Rethinking DeepSeek’s AI Threat Following the release of DeepSeek-V3 on December 26, 2024, Western nations, led by the United States, have found themselves caught between astonishment at China’s AI advancement and deep concerns over potential threats to…
Who is the colonizer and who is colonized?
Review City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule Ho-Fung Hung. Cambridge University Press, 2022. It takes time to digest the meaning of an event of such monumental geopolitical importance as Hong Kong’s revolt against Chinese rule from 2003…