We live in a time when rapid technological change is shifting the global security balance in real time, and no one knows that better than Sarah Kreps, director of the Brooks School Technology Policy Institute (BTPI) and the John L. Weatherill Professor in the Department of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Krebs’ year off work was balanced with responding to a White House request for advice on how to think about elections and democratic participation in the age of AI, working on his own book on technology policy, and studying the regulatory regime that governs artificial intelligence to create a new theoretical roadmap for U.S. policymakers grappling with the promises and potential perils of generative AI.
“It was clear to me that technology and strategy were moving faster than the policy gears were turning, and that worried me,” Kreps said of his motivation for founding the Brook School Technology Policy Institute. “Without developing well-researched, responsible policies, we can’t safely unleash the potential of AI and other emerging technologies.”
With funding from the Jain Family Institute, Kreps and BTPI Fellow Adi Rao, a PhD student in Cornell University’s Government Department and an associate at the RAND Corporation, are finalizing a research paper that will offer a high-level framework for beginning to think about regulating AI technologies. Rao and Kreps are also partnering with Microsoft Research on AI policy. Meanwhile, Kreps fields several media inquiries each week as news cycles attack his field of expertise.
In response to these profound technological changes, the Institute has established itself as a leading authority at the intersection of national security and technology policy. With research centers in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, cryptocurrency, supercomputing, and drones, Brooks TPI serves as a hub for interdisciplinary collaboration at Cornell. Its mission is to bring together experts from all disciplines in STEM and the social sciences to work with policymakers and industry leaders to address emerging challenges to national security.
That’s exactly the ambition that led Brooks School senior lecturer James Patton Rogers to become the institute’s first executive director in fall 2023. Rogers, an expert on military history and technology, particularly drone warfare, has also had a busy year. He published a book, “Precision: A History of American Warfare,” in December and currently serves as a drone warfare adviser to NATO and the United Nations Security Council. His role includes researching high-tech weapons systems and preventing next-generation technology from falling into or out of the hands of violent non-state groups.
Rogers sees his work at BTPI as an effort to foster collaboration among scientists, defense experts, policymakers and industry leaders in ways that create new frameworks for solving pressing security challenges posed by emerging and disruptive technologies.
“We are working to understand which emerging technologies pose the greatest disruptive threats to national security today and to convene technology experts and policymakers to find new technical and policy solutions to these challenges,” Rogers said.
As an example, Rogers cited the work of BTPI Fellow and Ignite Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University, Dr. John McCandless, who works on the commercialization of semiconductor research. In his work with BTPI, Dr. McCandless focuses on the defense impact of emerging semiconductor technologies and communicates the technical nature of his research to policymakers, academics and industry leaders through dedicated talks and policy briefs.
“The students’ response to this research has been one of the most inspiring things, because it’s clear they understand how relevant this research is to both their futures and the future of international policy,” Kreps says. “The demand for student research assistants currently exceeds our capacity to accommodate them, but James and I think that for now, this is a good problem to have.”
