From geopolitics to geotechnics: global futures in the shadow of automation, cunning machines, and human speciation
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117820948582 |
| Author | Jairus Grove |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117820948582
International Relations
2020, Vol. 34(3) 432 –455
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117820948582
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From geopolitics to
geotechnics: global futures
in the shadow of automation,
cunning machines, and
human speciation
Jairus Grove
University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
Abstract
This exploration provides an alternative future to that offered in the discussions surrounding
what is often referred to by the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ or the ‘third offset’. I argue that
even modest projections of existing trends have the capability of altering the grammar or ecology
of geopolitics as well as the drivers for competition and catastrophe. Such changes are more
significant than questions of how this or that actor might be different or which great powers may
shape the international order in a hundred years. The essay seeks to understand what disruptive
changes in non-human capability might mean for the shape of a potential geopolitics to come.
In a more general sense, I want to think about how violence will be distributed differently. Will
there be new sources and even kinds of competition unique to a global system populated and in
some cases, structured by cunning machines – some mechanical, others digital – and what are the
implications for how we imagine international relations?
Keywords
automation, fourth industrial revolution, geopolitics, machines, planetary relations, third offset
Preface
It is a strange task to write by invitation. In some sense it is an assignment or a response
to someone else’s question quite different from the way thoughts invade and slowly bub-
ble up to inspire writing normally. As a result, this article is directed at a problem some-
one else has chosen. An interesting problem but as it is not my problem my response is
Corresponding author:
Jairus Grove, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, 2424 Maile Way, Saunders 617, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA.
Email: jairusg@hawaii.edu
948582IRE0010.1177/0047117820948582International RelationsGrove
research-article2020
Article
Grove 433
speculative rather than propositional. I am not proposing an argument that I will then
prove through an exemplary pile of data. Instead, I am interested in how one goes about
answering the question posed and I am making use of the knowledge I have from other
research projects and thinking to formulate a judgment or conjecture to answer the
assignment. I have written what I think is a scholarly reply but this is more of an essay
than an article.
For me, this particular essay is uncanny because it responds to an invitation to think
about the next 100 years of international relations. Or maybe the next 100 years of
International Relations as the invitation came on the occasion of the hundredth anniver-
sary of the founding of the Department of International Relations at Aberystwyth
University. I have tried to address here both possibilities.
I will try to describe a possible version of international relations on this planet in
100 years and I will address what that planetary situation would demand of International
Relations as a field. However, doing so makes me feel a bit like William Holden’s
character Joe Gillis in Sunset Blvd tasked with narrating the events leading up to his
own murder. Face down in a pool, surrounded by investigators, speaking from a posi-
tion of everywhere and nowhere – an impossible position. In the year 2120 I will most
certainly be dead. Given the plummeting life expectancy in the U.S. even the young-
est people I know will likely have been gone for at least a couple of decades. And
given what I am about to say about the possible future of the planet the odds are good
I am off the hook from being read too harshly if ‘reading’ is even still a thing that
happens at all.
Here are a few provisos for writing after the fact of one’s own existence. First, what
takes place in such an exercise is not knowledge in the Kantian sense. To ponder before
or after one’s existence is to violate the correlationist principles by which the social sci-
ences are judged.1 I am inquiring into events that I cannot experience or observe, ever. In
fact, in some of the more extreme suggestions I make below those who possess the sen-
sory capability to continue the human habit of observation and meaning making may not
be precisely human, raising all sorts of epistemological questions far exceeding the
capacity of this intervention.
Second, there is no research question here. Research questions are for the living. This
article is written from a postmortem perspective. There is no one to answer for the test-
ing, confirming, or falsification of the ideas contained here. The empirical contribution
of the piece is supplanted by a different ground for judging the felicitous or infelicitous
character of the article. My invitation or request for the essay before you, is to think
otherwise than the dominant visions of how you expect the future to turn out. We are
most certainly both wrong but as assuredly our particular wagers will be long forgotten
before anyone can call us out.
Death, forgetting, oblivion, I believe that is what Georges Bataille calls freedom. So
here we go!
Introduction
Troubled times encourage meditation.
–Raymond Aron, 1966
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