This essay examines the idea of the pluriverse as one response to recent calls for the decolonization of international and global ethics. It argues that taking pluriversality seriously challenges prevailing understandings of global ethics as the acquisition and application of moral expertise. Instead of aiming to know the meaning of global justice and then apply it to particular contexts, a pluriversal ethics addresses the question of how to cultivate a practical ethic of coexistence and collaboration with others in an ontologically plural and radically hierarchical world.

To adequately estimate the beneficial and harmful effects of artificial intelligence (AI), we must first have a clear understanding of what AI is and what it is not. We need to draw important conceptual and definitional boundaries to ensure we accurately estimate and measure the impacts of AI from both empirical and normative standpoints. This essay argues that we should not conflate AI with automation or autonomy but keep them conceptually separate. Moreover, it suggests that once we have a broad understanding of what constitutes AI, we will see that it can be applied to all sectors of the economy and in warfare. However, it cautions that we must be careful where we apply AI, for in some cases there are serious epistemological concerns about whether we have an appropriate level of knowledge to create such systems. Opening the aperture to include such questions allows us to further see that while AI systems will be deployed in a myriad of forms, with greater or lesser cognitive abilities, these systems ought never to be considered moral agents. They cannot possess rights, and they do not have any duties.

What are the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on human rights in the next three decades? Precise answers to this question are made difficult by the rapid rate of innovation in AI research and by the effects of human practices on the adaption of new technologies. Precise answers are also challenged by imprecise usages of the term “AI.” There are several types of research that all fall under this general term. We begin by clarifying what we mean by AI. Most of our attention is then focused on the implications of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which entail that an algorithm or group of algorithms will achieve something like superintelligence. While acknowledging that the feasibility of superintelligence is contested, we consider the moral and ethical implications of such a potential development. What do machines owe humans and what do humans owe superintelligent machines?

Among the many disruptions caused by artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies (including automation, cyberwarfare, surveillance, loss of privacy, fake news, infrastructure vulnerability), the effects on development pathways are likely to be significant and complex. AI will enable low-income countries to leapfrog in several sectors, including e-governance, e-finance, e-health, and e-education. Yet AI will also lead to automation, reducing the demand for labor, especially unskilled labor. Labor-intensive sectors such as apparel will provide fewer jobs, and lower export earnings. Development strategies will need to adjust accordingly.

How will emerging autonomous and intelligent systems affect the international landscape of power and coercion two decades from now? Will the world see a new set of artificial intelligence (AI) hegemons just as it saw a handful of nuclear powers for most of the twentieth century? Will autonomous weapon systems make conflict more likely or will states find ways to control proliferation and build deterrence, as they have done (fitfully) with nuclear weapons? And importantly, will multilateral forums find ways to engage the technology holders, states as well as industry, in norm setting and other forms of controlling the competition? The answers to these questions lie not only in the scope and spread of military applications of AI technologies but also in how pervasive their civilian applications will be. Just as civil nuclear energy and peaceful uses of outer space have cut into and often shaped discussions on nuclear weapons and missiles, the burgeoning uses of AI in consumer products and services, health, education, and public infrastructure will shape views on norm setting and arms control. New mechanisms for trust and confidence-building measures might be needed not only between China and the United States—the top competitors in comprehensive national strength today—but also among a larger group of AI players, including Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reaching into every aspect of global health. In this essay, I examine one example of AI's potential contributions and limitations in global health: the prediction, treatment, and containment of a global influenza outbreak. The potential advantages are clear. AI can aid global influenza surveillance platforms by improving the capacity of organizations to look for novel influenza outbreak strains in the right places, to identify populations most likely to spread influenza, and to produce real-time information about the disease's spread by monitoring social media communications to track outbreak events. There are also very real limitations to what AI can do, and it is crucial that AI not be used as an excuse not to invest in strengthening health systems and other traditional components of global healthcare. AI may also be able to improve our understanding of who should receive a vaccine and what is most effective for large-scale vaccine delivery, but there will always be blind spots that the data cannot fill. Investment in healthcare, with attention to the danger of minimal access to care for minority groups that are at risk and in fragile situations, remains the best chance to prepare communities for outbreak detection, surveillance, and containment.

Technology has an outsized impact on the modern world; it is how we have tamed our frontiers. But that role is largely ignored when it comes to the Arctic frontier. Emerging technologies, especially AI, can enable desperately needed services and infrastructure—but they can also challenge ethics, law, and policy, as they usually do. For instance, autonomous icebreaker ships pose a dual-use dilemma since they can be used for both humanitarian and military purposes. As a lesson for other frontiers, this article will broadly introduce the potential role of AI in the changing Arctic and some of the ethical concerns that deserve attention before that future arrives.

The principles of the best interest of children and subsidiarity constitute the conceptual foundation of the Convention on Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (HCIA). Subsidiarity in the HCIA dictates a priority for domestic adoption placements for children over intercountry adoption. This article argues against subsidiarity on two fronts. First, the analysis shows that the in-principle priority of domestic adoption cannot be justified on the basis of either heritage rights or state sovereignty. Second, the principle of subsidiarity in the HCIA is a procedural principle, one that stipulates the political/geographical location of the placement of children through a priority ordering. This does not comport with the principle of subsidiarity as it has been conceptualized in ethics and social philosophy, which gives normative structure to the process of decision-making by stipulating the proper level for decisional authority. Subsidiarity in this original sense holds that decisions regarding child welfare should be made at the lowest level possible, by those most affected by the decisions, unless doing so would not be the most suited to protecting and promoting the best interests of children. Appealing to subsidiarity in this theoretical version reveals at least two significant problems with HCIA placement policy and leads to the conclusion that subsidiarity in the HCIA must be formally revised as a structural principle of ethics that will not support the general priority of domestic adoption.

Liberal internationalism is under the microscope as never before as it faces a world experiencing turbulence and anxiety. The specter of right-wing authoritarianism and even fascism haunt Western societies as struggles for recognition dominate domestic politics, while demands of (re)emerging states for international representation grow more compelling. Simultaneously, there is broader recognition of a growing legitimacy crisis of the American hegemon principally due to the mindsets and failures of its liberal hegemonic elites. Both developments are major advances in the understandings of how the West dominates “diversity regimes” and co-opts discourses universal in origin and character and of how the U.S. foreign policy establishment has brought the world to the current conjuncture. Yet, there are limitations still. Although central, the concepts of diversity, hierarchy, and elites need to be broadened out significantly, and rooted in corporate-class power, to fully comprehend the core crises of the international order today.