National security expert Jo Miller spells out dangers to rules-based international order in public lecture

National security professional Jo Miller warned of the dangers of putting unquestioning faith in technologies and popular figures, amid geopolitical uncertainty, in her State of a Nation lecture at University of Gloucestershire.

The former national security professional in the UK Government, National Security Officer at Microsoft, and Board adviser, brought her expertise in technology, security, and geopolitics to explore the emerging dangers to democracies in her address at the University’s Park Campus.

Jo Miller said: “Geopolitical uncertainty is driving behaviours that risk further undermining democracy and fracturing the rules-based international order, which we (the West) have dominated and enjoyed for nearly a century. At the same time, technological innovation and bifurcation between East and West is accelerating both the progress and the decline of humanity – to put it lightly.

“I often remind people who are puzzled over AI hallucinations and inaccuracies that these models are designed based on the cognitive processes of the human brain. Just as the human brain lies, fabricates, conflates opinion with fact, embellishes and misremembers, so do the tools that we have built to artificially replicate it.

“Putting uninhibited faith – unquestioning faith – in technologies and popular figures are examples of us being at risk of handing over our agency and our willingness to become spectators in the potential demise of our uniquely human functions: to challenge, to question, to reason.”

The University’s public lectures offer an opportunity to hear from leading academic and public figures, presenting research and discussing topical subjects. Lectures are free to attend, but tickets must be booked in advance.

Attended by more than 150 guests, Jo Miller’s lecture continued: “We might conclude that the Nation State is in a bit of a state because of forces that have disrupted our neat state-level governance structures that have served us well for a few centuries.

“Those forces might include capitalism, commercialism, corporate interests and identities, and the sheer pace and scale of technological innovation. This has brought into question what or who we identify with.

“More importantly, it is impacting on our ability to identify at all. Our ability to feel that we belong – to enquire, to question, and to reason sufficiently to make conscious and collective choices about who we are and where we are going, independently and collectively.

“Do we choose to evolve, deliberately and consciously, as Homo Sapiens or are we sleep-walking into Homo Machina? Or worse.

“We are at risk of agitating over how bad things have become, and misremember an uncomplicated and glorious past that, to be quite frank, never existed. Because we have been here before, repeatedly. Our forebears were living on the lip of the future, just as we are now.”

Referring to current events around the world, Jo Miller added: “Are we repeating those same mistakes, overlooking the rights that Venezuela, Canada, Greenland, and Taiwan, have to national self-determination, feeding the confidence and aggression of global superpowers and strengthening these emerging regional zones?

“Of course, the future, thankfully, is not yet written. We can reclaim that agency that we are increasingly at risk of giving away, whether we are giving it to our national leaders or authorities, to populist public figures, to ungoverned technologies, to commerce and clever marketing, just to ‘others’.

“We have power – it is not earned or claimed or given. We have it. We have agency, and we must use it wisely and intelligently, and we must not give it away.”

Main picture: Jo Miller presenting her State of a Nation lecture at University of Gloucestershire