Trust, Confidence, and the Adoption of General Purpose Technologies

• In Event: International Governance Challenges of Emerging Technologies

Abstract

From Vladimir Putin to Eric Schmidt, political leaders and business leaders believe that the world has entered a period of rapid technological change where leadership in developing new technologies such as artificial intelligence will mean the difference between winning and losing in international politics. Understanding how countries, businesses, and people make choices about adopting emerging technologies is a vital question for international politics. Yet, while literature on military innovation focuses on how countries make choices about adopting relatively mature technologies, we know much less about how countries decide when and how to adopt emerging technologies for military use that have high uncertainty parameters. This paper leverages a survey experiment and the case study of electricity adoption by armies in the late 19th century to explore how militaries think about the adoption of general purpose technologies.

Author

• Michael Horowitz, University of Pennsylvania