JOHNS HOPKINS SAIS FOREIGN POLICY INSTITUTE · 2022
Dignity, Technology, and Global Order
New Approaches to Complex Challenges
We are at a moment of intensifying risk to the global order. The perennial threats to international peace and stability — inequality, economic insecurity, military competition, and ideological division — are all on the rise, intertwined with and exacerbated by the profound impacts of emerging technologies. This paper argues that a shared understanding of human dignity is both the missing foundation for effective technology governance and the most promising basis for a more sustainable global order.
ABOUT THIS WORK
A different kind of policy paper
Most policy work on the United States, China, and emerging technologies focuses on competition, capability, and risk. This paper asks a prior question: what kind of world are we actually trying to build, and for whom?
The answer proposed here begins with dignity — understood not as a vague rhetorical flourish, but as a common aspect of our humanity that is due reciprocal moral respect. Using technology as a focusing lens, the paper develops a more operationalized understanding of dignity across cultures and legal traditions, and argues that this understanding is essential to any serious effort at technology governance or global institutional reform.
The paper was funded by the Ford Foundation and published in March 2022 by the Johns Hopkins SAIS Foreign Policy Institute (digital edition ISBN 978-1-947661-09-7).
WHAT THE PAPER COVERS
Structure and argument
I. Technology and Global Order An examination of the US-China relationship as the defining geopolitical frame for emerging technology governance — including the era of techno-sovereignty, a taxonomy of emerging technologies, and the inadequacies of current governance frameworks.
III. A New Organizational Model A proposed organizational framework for addressing complex, transnational challenges — drawing on the ARPA, Bell Labs, XeroxPARC, Janelia, RAND, and other examples of successful long-term, interdisciplinary research.
II. Organizational Inadequacy A frank assessment of why think tanks, universities, and government institutions have failed to generate the new thinking required — and what lessons innovative organizations offer for doing better.
IV. Dignity: A Rationale and Research Agenda The paper's core contribution. A rigorous exploration of what dignity means, why it matters for technology governance, how technology can serve as a lens for sharpening our understanding of dignity across cultures, and what a serious research agenda around dignity would look like.
THE HEART OF THE ARGUMENT
Why dignity and why now
Dignity is admittedly a contentious term. Is it, as some critics have argued, too vague and imprecise to be useful? Or is it essential to any serious conversation about what it means to exist and flourish as a human being?
This paper argues for the latter — and goes further. Without a clearer, more operationalized understanding of dignity, policy on artificial intelligence, biotechnology, quantum computing, and the governance of the U.S.-China competition will remain either too general to be practically useful, or too politically laden to be universally acceptable.
Technology provides the focusing mechanism. Examining how emerging technologies affect privacy, autonomy, alienation, the nature of work, and human relationships across cultures allows us to bring dignity into higher resolution and sharper focus — grounding an abstract concept in shared human experience.
"A peaceful and prosperous 21st century depends to a great extent on how the United States and China reconcile competing interests and ideologies. Working actively towards a shared understanding of dignity, beginning with the impacts of technology, is surely not the only way — but would be a positive start."
— Nathaniel Ahrens, Dignity, Technology, and Global Order (2022)