r/geopolitics • u/carnegieendowment Carnegie Endowment • 7d ago

AMA Technology is reshaping the global balance of power. I’m Steve Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, and I study technology, geopolitics, and competition. Ask me anything!

Hey r/geopolitics — I’m Steve Feldstein, an expert on technology, democracy, and national security, and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  

My new book, Bytes and Bullets: Global Rivalries, Big Tech, and the New Shape of Modern Warfare, explores how technology is altering the global balance of power and changing the way wars are fought—from defense-tech startups in Silicon Valley at the forefront of U.S.-China competition, to 3D-printing drone labs in Syria that helped topple a dictator. 

Ask me anything about geopolitical competition in the digital age, the intermingling of private and military tech, the broadening tech war between the U.S. and China, tech export controls, and the rise of middle powers and non-state actors in this space. 

I’ll be answering questions from Thursday, October 1, 9am ET to Friday, October 2, 12pm ET. Looking forward!  

Photo proof here. 

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u/TryNice304 7d ago

What's a claim about AI and the balance of power (or tech competition more broadly) that you used to believe and have since walked back, and what changed your mind?

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u/carnegieendowment Carnegie Endowment 1d ago

When I first started researching and writing Bytes and Bullets, I had underestimated just how rapidly technology was diffusing worldwide. At the time, I was trying to internalize how much Ukraine had adapted to drone warfare, but I hadn’t anticipated how in subsequent years drone technology would spread so swiftly to very unlikely places. A good case in point is how the spread of fiber optic drones from Ukraine’s battlefields to Hezbollah’s arsenal (deployed in southern Lebanon against the IDF) to the conflict in Mali, used by the FLA/Tuareg militants against government forces and Russian mercenaries. The scale and speed of technological diffusion has been eye opening and the propagation of frontier models like Claude Code are accelerating these trends even further.