How AI Is Reshaping Diplomacy and Global Affairs

With artificial intelligence putting productivity on hyperspeed, the painstaking but often slow nature of dealing with other countries, as well as policymaking, is also forced to speed up.

But a panel at the forefront of these changes at the BRIDGE Summit in Abu Dhabi—which convenes creators, policymakers, investors, technologists, media institutions, and cultural leaders around the world to discuss the future of media—said that breaking things fast is not without consequences.

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“Decision makers are being asked to make decisions very quickly on the basis of information that may not be verified or verifiable,” Elizabeth Churchill, a professor of Human-Computer Interaction from the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, told moderator Nikhil Kumar, an executive editor at TIME, which is a media partner of the BRIDGE Summit.

Churchill, who held senior roles in firms like Google and Yahoo, said she returned to academia to explore transparent and “interrogable” AI tools and content that is effectively watermarked—so that decision-makers know at a glance if information is trustworthy. She said current shortfalls in information quality are “very much a design problem that sits at the surface of all of the tools that we use and in diplomacy conversations many different people are using.”

The speeds at which technologies spread vary across different parts of the world, depending on available infrastructure. Kate Kallot has focused on expanding technology access in Africa and the Global South, and as the CEO and founder of data infrastructure start-up Amini, she reflected on how the continent is still data-scarce and how it needs localized data ecosystems to accelerate its development.

“When we think about equity, we need to think about where we’re starting from a regional standpoint, and how much catching up we have to do,” Kallot said.

Where these technologies come from and who built them also heavily “matters,” said Noam Perski, executive vice president of Palantir Technologies, the Denver-based software firm behind many governments’ data-mining systems. He said he sees that the world could be split into the AI ecosystems of China and the U.S. but also entertained the possibility of a “tripolar” world with the Middle East’s continuous investments in emerging technologies.

But to Perski, what’s crucial is: “How do you take these technologies and apply them to the business of keeping people safe, counterterrorism, other things—now, how do you apply them to keeping businesses going, to competing in a global ecosystem? And this is really about how these technologies meet the real world.”

Technological advancements must learn to localize, said Palantir’s Perski, reflecting on the company’s global presence. “A lot of this comes down to the culture,” he said. “How receptive is a culture to disruption?”

Kallot added that developers in Silicon Valley should also address any biases or narratives about the Global South, making it easier for these regions to adapt technologies like AI. “Africa should not be an afterthought for them,” she said.

More broadly, however, conversations on emergent technologies should focus on value systems and improved literacy, said Churchill, which will enhance human oversight.

“If we don’t speak up and get involved in governance and making policy and as individuals and groups get involved,” she said, “then we are also accountable for things not being equitable, not being equal, and for some of the dangerous potential for AI systems.”