美中全球议题对话项目

As a student in the science, technology, and international affairs program in the School of Foreign Service, I have spent much of my time at Georgetown studying the interaction between policy and technology. I am fascinated by how politics can affect scientific and technological progress and conversely how technological advancement influences governance and diplomacy. In the first three virtual sessions of the U.S.-China Student Dialogue, I was delighted to find my peers eager to discuss these topics in the context of the U.S.-China relationship and thrilled to realize how much insight could be gained from cross-cultural dialogue.

Particularly as artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly advances, technology policy has become a critical global issue. Countries everywhere must decide how to regulate this new technology and foster its development, while considering how it might affect national security, transform our economies, and consume our natural resources. As the rate of technological development accelerates, it becomes increasingly difficult for policy to keep pace with new technologies. We see this challenge certainly with AI but also with social media, biotechnology, and other technologies. Discussing data privacy and artificial intelligence with my Chinese peers, I realized that international dialogue is essential to addressing this challenge, as it allows us to consider different viewpoints, compare policy approaches, and adapt more quickly by learning from each other.

Though the U.S. and China are competing to develop increasingly advanced AI models, our dialogue revealed significant room for cooperation as the people in our two countries share many of the same hopes and concerns for this remarkable technology. In the dialogue, we personalized the issue, discussing our conflicted feelings about using AI in our work and education. We expressed optimism that AI could help us solve significant problems in medicine and engineering. We also shared our worries about job loss and weaponization, and hypothesized potential responses to these challenges.

However, while these points of agreement were uplifting, our points of disagreement were far more interesting and, perhaps, more useful. Though students from both countries shared concerns about data privacy, we held sharply contrasting perspectives on the issue. The Americans, myself included, worried about government use of personal data. We wondered how our counterparts felt about government surveillance in China and whether it limited their freedom. The perspective they shared in response was wholly different from any that I have encountered in my Georgetown classes on technology policy. Our Chinese peers explained how their government protected them from corporations, criminals, and foreign adversaries, and how surveillance made them safer by aiding this pursuit. The Chinese students, in turn, wondered why Americans would be so preoccupied with government surveillance but largely unconcerned with corporate power and control over our personal data.

Beyond providing insights about tech policy, this exchange revealed many of the deeper assumptions underlying our different political systems. It surprised me to realize that the Chinese students seemingly trust their government much more so than Americans trust our own, even as we hold democratic elections to ensure our officials represent the people’s interests. It forced me to question why Americans do not worry more about corporate power, particularly in the technology sector. It allowed me to wonder how artificial intelligence might develop differently in our respective political systems, and consider which interests this remarkable technology might ultimately be allowed to serve.

Asking these questions is somewhat uncomfortable. Doing so forces us to reexamine our most deeply rooted convictions about freedom and democracy. But I believe that it is absolutely necessary to engage with these conversations. We are living through a time of tremendous technological change, and it is necessary to explore how our policies and institutions might need to change too. Dialogue between the United States and China allows us to do exactly that: bring together diverse perspectives to critically assess our political and economic systems in the present day and generate ideas for improving them in the future.

Caroline Kiely (SFS'26) is a student at Georgetown University studying science, technology, and international affairs with a concentration in energy and the environment.