Author: Shana

Several of the readings for this week discussed how developments in artificial intelligence (AI) technology is a double-edged sword, promising to make so many aspects of human life more efficient, convenient, and secure while creating new forms of threats – and raising uncharted legal questions. Many of these readings noted China’s ambitious AI strategy.

When we talk about China and AI, it’s usually in the context of protestors in Hong Kong or the Uighur minority population. We think immediately of the PRC’s odious use of facial recognition technology to track and suppress activists and political dissidents, or to assign social scores to reinforce “good behavior” among its population. China and AI, in the same breath, usually bring to mind the violation of civil liberties.

But this recent WaPo article describes another use of Chinese AI technology that will have decidedly positive consequences for international security: AI technology in agriculture and facial recognition for livestock.

Orwell’s nightmare? Facial recognition for animals promises a farmyard revolution.

The practice of tracking individual farm animals has several purposes, most of which are about optimizing agricultural production. But facial recognition to track individual cows, pigs, or other livestock can also help to identify signs of infection and illness in their earliest stages. With advanced AI technology, we could detect swine flu, bubonic plague, and even coronavirus in animals and stem diseases before they destroy food supply chains or spread to human populations.  This technology could be tremendously consequential for global food security given that China feeds over 20% of the world’s population and, of course, would have positive consequences for global health. Imagine if signs of the novel coronavirus could have been identified by AI technology last year in the markets of Wuhan? It would have been a different 2020 indeed.

No one denies that AI technology has lots of positive uses, but China rarely gets good press in this area so I thought I’d highlight it.

This week’s readings led me to revisit several pieces by Ambassador Bill Burns, former State Department official and current president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Though it was published over a month ago, Burns’ recent article in The Atlantic “The U.S. Needs a New Foreign Policy” dovetails nicely on some of the ideas he expressed in his Foreign Affairs piece we read for this week. That piece underscored the need for reinvestment, rebuilding, and reform in U.S. diplomacy and the State Department specifically.

In this newer piece, Burns discusses the future of U.S. foreign policy and describes three separate paths the United States might pursue in world affairs: retrenchment, restoration, and reinvention. Burns describes retrenchment as a less radical, more strategic take on the current administration’s foreign policy approach, which would mean “narrowing our concept of vital interests, sharply reducing global military deployments, shedding outdated alliances, and reining in our missionary zeal for democracy-building abroad.” Meanwhile, Burns describes restoration as a renewed commitment to robust U.S. global leadership in the post-Trump era, given that “it continues to have the world’s strongest military, most influential economy, most expansive alliance system, and most potent soft power.” But the strategy Burns ultimately recommends is reinvention in U.S. foreign policy.  He says this is the middle path that strikes “a balance between [U.S.] ambitions and limitations.”

Ultimately, Burns’ concept of reinvention sounds to me like smart retrenchment. Burns says reinvention will mean recommitting to multilateralism in acknowledgement that the era of the U.S. as lone global superpower has ended. It will mean thoughtfully managing our alliances and competition with rising global powers. Reinvention has a very nice ring to it (it’s a word he used an awful lot in his State Department piece) but I’m not sure I see how it is meaningfully different than retrenchment at the end of the day.

Burns also says that rebuilding the middle class in the United States will be key to the reinvention of U.S. foreign policy.  This discussion echoes some of the ideas in his Foreign Affairs piece in which he made the (very important) point that the State Department would do well to highlight the economic and commercial work it does overseas and focus on explaining how that work benefits workers and communities in the United States.  Connecting foreign policy objectives to prosperity at home is absolutely critical.