Technology and Strategic Surprise: Adapting to an Era of Open Innovation

We are in a period of open technological innovation that gives ordinary individuals and small groups unprecedented power. The effects of these changes are all around us—for example, web-based apps, social media, and chain sites recently enabled far-right extremists to plot, coordinate, and storm the Capitol. And the same tools then enabled the FBI to arrest those who engaged in criminal acts. In this presentation based on her award-winning book, Audrey Kurth Cronin will discuss how terrorists and small groups have shared and used technology in the past, and how they are likely to do so now. The diffusion of modern technologies—digital media, robotics, cyber weapons, 3-D printing, synthetic biology, autonomous systems, machine learning, and various types of artificial intelligence—makes them accessible to a much broader range of people now, especially in democracies.

The talk will conclude with a discussion of countermeasures against the abuse of new technologies, to maximize their promise, protect our democracy, and avoid the otherwise predictable unfolding of terrorism, insurrection, and insurgency in the future.

Audrey Kurth Cronin joined the faculty of the School of International Service in August 2016. She was a faculty member and director of the core course on War and Statecraft at the U.S. National War College. Before which she was Academic Director of Studies for the Oxford/Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War at Oxford University (Nuffield College). Prior, she was Specialist in Terrorism at the Congressional Research Service, responsible for advising Members of Congress in the aftermath of 9/11. She's served in the U.S. Executive branch, including the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy. Her best-known book is How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns (Princeton University Press) and has been translated in Chinese and Arabic. Her newest book, Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow's Terrorists (Oxford University Press, 2020), which Foreign Affairs recently named on its "Best of 2019" list, analyzes the risks and opportunities of emerging technologies, especially patterns of global diffusion and innovation by individuals, terrorists, insurgents and other private actors.