On Tuesday, the Cyber Policy Center hosted Amy Zegart, an award-winning and world-renowned expert on U.S. intelligence, emerging technology, and global political risk, to give a talk as part of the Stanford Spring Seminar Series. 

In her talk, Professor Zegart discussed emerging technologies and their impact on geopolitics, focusing on how many aspects of U.S. foreign policy – from economic statecraft to deterrence – rely on outdated ideas from the Cold War. 
 

Key Takeaways

1. Power dynamics are changing in three ways: between nation-states, within nation-states, and the sources of national power – which are shifting from tangible goods (e.g. natural resources or physical exports) to intangible goods (e.g. data, knowledge, or algorithms).
    
2. These changes have implications for the ways the United States thinks about, measures, and wields its geopolitical power. Professor Zegart emphasized the crucial and largely overlooked role of knowledge power – noting that the global knowledge power map has changed in significant ways. Three key measures of knowledge power to track are U.S. educational outcomes, the geographic concentration of technological talent, and the overall health of the nation's research universities. In all three of these areas, the United States’ knowledge power is eroding substantially.
    
3. Specifically, the health of research universities will have long-lasting impacts on U.S. competitiveness, as commercialized innovations (e.g. the MRI, mRNA vaccines, or internet technologies) are the product of decades of prior research. China, she notes, sees the vital role of fundamental research for economic dynamism and national security. The PRC is spending six times faster than the U.S. on fundamental research in universities and will surpass the United States within this decade if current trends continue. 

Amy Zegart is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Associate Director and Senior Fellow at the Human-Centered AI Institute, the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Professor of Political Science by courtesy at Stanford University.

Join us next week on Tuesday, April 22 at 1pm PT as Jeff Hancock, Director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and Co-director of the Cyber Policy Center, gives a talk on Categorizing, Measuring, and Mitigating Social Media Harms Among Adolescents. To learn about future Cyber Policy Center events, visit CPC's event page.