4. Information technology has massively increased certain kinds of coordination (e.g., email, eBay, Facebook, Uber), but at the international relations level, IT seems to have made very little impact. Why?
I note the coordination is entirely at a lower-level than those companies: mostly individuals are using these services for coordination, as well as small groups. It seems like coordination innovations aren’t bottom up, but rather top-down (even if the IT examples are mostly opt-in). This seems to match other large coordination improvements, like empire, monotheism, or corporations. There is no higher level of abstraction than governments from which to improve international relations, it seems to me.
Quite separately, we could ask: what are the specific challenges in international relations that IT could address? The problems mostly revolve around questions of trust, questions of the basic competence of human agents (diplomats, ambassadors, heads of state, etc), and fundamental conflicts of interest. None of these are really addressable with off-the-shelf IT solutions.
That being said, it’s also clear that Facebook and Uber aren’t even trying to target problems related to international relations. We know contracting with multiple governments is achievable, because people like Google, Microsoft, and Palantir all manage it selling IT for intelligence purposes. Dominic Cummings has a blog post High performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, Michael Nielsen, Bret Victor, & ‘Seeing Rooms’ that speculates about how international relations could be improved by making the stupendous complexity of the information at work more readily available to decision makers, both for educational purposes and in real time. Maybe there would be an opportunity for a Situation Room Industries, or similar.
I note the coordination is entirely at a lower-level than those companies: mostly individuals are using these services for coordination, as well as small groups. It seems like coordination innovations aren’t bottom up, but rather top-down (even if the IT examples are mostly opt-in). This seems to match other large coordination improvements, like empire, monotheism, or corporations. There is no higher level of abstraction than governments from which to improve international relations, it seems to me.
Quite separately, we could ask: what are the specific challenges in international relations that IT could address? The problems mostly revolve around questions of trust, questions of the basic competence of human agents (diplomats, ambassadors, heads of state, etc), and fundamental conflicts of interest. None of these are really addressable with off-the-shelf IT solutions.
That being said, it’s also clear that Facebook and Uber aren’t even trying to target problems related to international relations. We know contracting with multiple governments is achievable, because people like Google, Microsoft, and Palantir all manage it selling IT for intelligence purposes. Dominic Cummings has a blog post High performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, Michael Nielsen, Bret Victor, & ‘Seeing Rooms’ that speculates about how international relations could be improved by making the stupendous complexity of the information at work more readily available to decision makers, both for educational purposes and in real time. Maybe there would be an opportunity for a Situation Room Industries, or similar.