ABOUT THIS SITE
Why Dignity Hub exists
The monograph Dignity, Technology, and Global Order was researched and written during the COVID pandemic in 2021, before anyone was talking seriously about AI, at least publicly. It was borne out of a concern for the accelerating impacts of emerging technologies on human dignity and flourishing — impacts already profound before large language models became a household topic, and for which existing policy frameworks were wholly unprepared. It grew from a frustration with the inability of think tanks, universities, and government institutions to think beyond short-term national competition — producing tactical responses to the "China challenge" while consistently failing to ask the deeper strategic question: what kind of world are we actually trying to build, and on what values is it grounded? And it was driven by a desire to establish human dignity as the shared ethical foundation from which a genuinely new approach to technology governance and global order could be developed — beginning with a more rigorous and operationalized understanding of what dignity actually means in practice.
The paper was published in March 2022. Within a year, the public release of ChatGPT had made the questions it raised unavoidable for everyone. The urgency had not changed — but the audience had grown considerably.
Dignity Hub exists because a single monograph, however carefully argued, is not sufficient to the task. The questions the paper raises — about the meaning of dignity, its relationship to technology, its role in US-China relations, its presence or absence in the world's founding legal documents — are not questions that get resolved; they are questions that require ongoing inquiry, debate, and development. This site is the infrastructure for that ongoing work: a place to host and extend the argument of the paper, to curate the sources that bear on it, to explore the documents where dignity appears and disappears, and to write — in essays long and short — as the thinking develops in real time.
The liberal world order has lost its authority without anything yet taking its place. Emerging technologies are reshaping the conditions of human life faster than our institutions can respond. The United States and China are locked in a competition that, without a shared ethical foundation, risks becoming a conflict neither side can afford. In that context, the challenge the 1961 Rockefeller Special Studies Report named — and which remains unmet six decades later — is more pressing than ever: to give concrete meaning to the idea of human dignity.
That is what this site is for.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nathaniel Ahrens
Nat Ahrens has spent thirty years at the intersection of China, technology, and global order — and has come to believe that none of those subjects can be understood without a serious account of human dignity.
That conviction is the foundation of his work at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Foreign Policy Institute, where he is a Senior Fellow researching the geopolitics and ethics of emerging technologies. His monograph Dignity, Technology, and Global Order: New Solutions to Complex Challenges (Johns Hopkins, 2022) argues that dignity — understood as the common aspect of our humanity due reciprocal moral respect — is not only essential to technology governance, but to any viable vision of a shared global future. Without a clearer, more operationalized understanding of what dignity means and demands, policy on artificial intelligence, biotechnology, surveillance, and the US-China competition will remain either too vague to be useful or too contested to be actionable.
That argument is grounded in experience, not abstraction. Ahrens spent nearly a decade living and working in China — in telecommunications, sourcing, and, memorably, managing cruise ships on the Yangtze River — before moving to Washington to work on China policy full-time. He served as Director of China Affairs at the University of Maryland, Deputy Director and Fellow with the Hills Program on Governance at CSIS, and Adjunct Fellow with the CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies. He was also a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he focused on Chinese innovation and climate policy. Ahrens also founded the nonprofit American Mandarin Society.
Today, alongside his work at SAIS FPI, runs Pacific Prospects, a strategic advisory and research firm focused on China risk, due diligence, and strategic intelligence. He also serves as Senior China Advisor at Crumpton Global. His expertise spans Chinese technology and industrial policy, Communist Party ideology and politics, and the strategic dimensions of U.S.-China competition.
The through-line across all of it is a question that becomes more urgent with every passing year: what does it mean to flourish as a human being in an age of rapid technological change — and what would it take to build institutions and norms that protect that flourishing across cultures and across the U.S.-China divide?