Technological Change

Technological change can enhance human capacity, but also carries risks and vulnerabilities. Sié Center faculty explore the implications of technological change by examining how factors like trust, risk and organizational incentives affect military use of autonomous systems, how new technologies can be used by fundamentalists to achieve their goals, and how cryptocurrencies are reshaping the global political economy.  

Featured Project:

Disruptive Effects of Autonomy

Rapid advances in autonomous systems raise fascinating behavioral questions. In particular, for the Department of Defense, understanding how factors like trust, risk and organizational incentives could shape the development, use and effectiveness of autonomous systems will be critical. In order to answer these questions, experts will need to move beyond the purely technical factors and models of effectiveness traditionally used in military analysis and utilize a broader range of behavioral science tools and organizational theory.

This project, led by Professor Julia Macdonald and funded by a Minerva Research Grant, seeks to understand the human, organizational and political factors that affect the willingness of individuals and bureaucracies to adopt autonomous systems, and the potential consequences of these attitudes.