Introduction

Emerging technologies play a pervasive role across many aspects of everyday life, including in the manufacture of goods and services, global navigation systems, user interface software, and self-driving vehicles (to name a few). In the context of war, the abstraction of violence, and global security more broadly, devices such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used extensively in counterterrorist operations, while lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) continue to pose ethical and reliability questions about the use (and potential for misuse) of military power. Unsurprisingly, the compounding aspects deriving from cybersecurity, artificial intelligence (AI), and the transition from 4G to 5G (and 6G) all have the capacity to engender multiple complexities and disruptions across the state, nonstate, global governance, and security domains.

Other emerging technologies are also developing, such as advanced manufacturing techniques (3D printing), nanotechnology (including miniaturization of military technology), bioengineering (including biological weapons agents and human-machine symbiosis), quantum computing (including the potential decryption of classical information systems), and digitization technologies (including military tools and applications to manage “big data”). Further, it is evident that the most powerful state actors and multinational corporations are investing extensively in the range of such emerging disruptive technologies. While the dangers and security complications of the above-mentioned weapons and devices are not yet fully realized, policymakers will be compelled to address the threats presented by advanced weapons technologies and formulate international provisions to regulate or mitigate their use.

In providing a substantive examination across the emerging technologies “suite”—with specific focus on uninhabited vehicles (drones), LAWS, AI and cyber—this chapter seeks to elucidate the security challenges emanating from their development and at times aberrant advancement. Indeed, just as emerging technologies are disrupting many sectors of domestic economies, they are also transforming the global security arena. The power and pace of modern technologies call for new approaches to preventing a catastrophic conflict or mitigating a devastating miscalculation. However, diplomacy, deterrence, arms control, and direct military action, tools that have long been utilized to safeguard the national interest, are being challenged by precipitously evolving technologies that are presenting new problems with no clearly defined solutions. As the chapter conveys, while some efforts have been undertaken in the direction of regulating the usage and application of such technologies, coherency and agreement on pathways forward across the domains of states, nonstate actors, global governance, and security have been hard to attain.