Chatbots, deepfakes, machine-based intelligence. Distinguishing what is real from what appears to be real is one of the defining issues of our age. However, although the weapons of this war on reality have become more sophisticated with the advent of AI, the war itself is nothing new.
Ever since Plato’s Cave or Theseus’ ship, civilization has always busied itself with investigating the limits of ‘the real’. Are the phenomena that we observe mere reproductions of truth? If all the constituent parts of a real object are gradually replaced with imitations, does that object retain its real nature? These are not uniquely modern questions. And yet they echo our concerns today whenever we come across a new image, voice note or piece of text.
And what does any of this mean for Britain on the international stage?
AI has pervaded the world’s political, educational and economic systems. Though still not completely understood, the technology’s impacts on environmental and sustainability goals, the job market and the strength of democracy have all featured in the national and international press. What is less commonly discussed are AI’s direct implications on security and stability in the international sphere.
In his 2011 work The Future of Power, the seminal political theorist Joseph Nye outlines how the arena of international power is no longer only the preserve of nation states. A century ago, international affairs was a game played between sovereign countries. Power was exerted through conflict and diplomacy – levers only accessible to heads of state and government. However, since the end of the Second World War, the players of this game have changed. Non-state actors (NSA) have emerged as a potent force, with corporations, private militias and terrorist organizations all capable of destabilizing the international order. AI continues this trend. As the world becomes ever more dependent on this technology, developers of AI will become an increasingly powerful NSA. OPEC has given way to OpenAI.
In the last few months, Microsoft has pumped $400 million into AI data centre upgrades in Switzerland;. Google has announced $37 million of investment to support AI capacity in Africa; and . OpenAI has launched a new initiative to provide AI tools to the US federal government and has won a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense.
These headlines reveal a worrying truth: the fight between reality and simulation is being played out on the world(’s) stage. AI technologies are becoming among the most sought-after commodities in the global economy. What are the consequences of this movement towards simulated reality? Does the increasing obsession with AI reveal a global change of aesthetics? Even though individuals may be concerned with sorting the real from the simulated, is the world silently moving towards an acceptance of the artificial?
As unlikely as it may seem, in the middle of this swamp of existential worry, there sits a possible answer to one of Britain’s oldest problems.
Today, Britain is as much a country of empire as it was at its zenith. Its position in the world is derived directly from its former status as the foremost global power. The Empire provided Britain with both the manpower and economic resilience to win the two World Wars. From here, Britain could place itself at the highest table in the family of nations and furnish itself with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
Even as its colonies became independent in the post-War period, Britain could never shed its imperial sensibilities. Against this tide of decolonization, Britain maintained a policy of conserving territory for strategic military gain: Gibraltar for the Mediterranean, the Falklands for the South Atlantic, the British Virgin Islands for the Caribbean, et cetera. And until 2024, the Chagos Islands for the Indian Ocean.
In October last year, the British government announced that the Chagos Islands would be handed over to Mauritius following a decades-long disagreement over the islands’ sovereignty. Under the agreement, Mauritius will assume control over the islands, but the United Kingdom would retain control of the UK-US military base on Diego Garcia (the largest of the Chagos Islands). The UK will lease the Diego Garcia base back to Mauritius for ninety-years at an average annual cost of £101 million. The terms of this agreement were criticised by the right-wing opponents of Keir Starmer’s government. Nigel Farage dismissed the deal as ‘not necessary’ and a move that played ‘into China’s hands’. Kemi Badenoch labelled it ‘an act of national self-harm’.
As much as the right would contest otherwise, Britain needed to resolve the issue of the Chagos Islands. Both the islands and Mauritius were ceded to the UK from France in 1814 after the Napoleonic Wars. In 1965, in response to a growing independence movement in Mauritius, the British government split the Chagos Islands off from the rest of Mauritius and established the British Indian Ocean Territory. In 1968, Mauritius gained independence, and the British government began forcibly expelling the native Chagossian population to provide the uninhabited island needed for the Diego Garcia base. For decades, human rights campaigners argued that Britain deliberately concealed its expulsion of the Chagossians from the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization (C-24) by claiming that the islands had no permanent population. In 2019, the ICJ found that the UK had no legal sovereignty over the Chagos Islands and recommended their transfer to Mauritius. When the UN General Assembly adopted the ICJ findings three months later, only four countries supported the UK and US. 115 supported Mauritius.
If Britain had any chance of supporting international peace and humanitarian causes, this blemish on its record had to be addressed. To this extent, Starmer’s hand was forced. However, his deal reveals a key paradox in Britain’s relationship with its imperial past. Restoring sovereignty to Mauritius while maintaining interim military control of Diego Garcia highlights how UK foreign policy is irreconcilably split between two responsibilities: the need to facilitate decolonization and the need to maintain the global presence that colonization has provided the country. In essence, Starmer has found a way to keep hold of Britain’s ill-gotten colonial spoils while simultaneously presenting himself as the great supporter of decolonization. He sits atop an empire in all but name.
But can this paradox of dual responsibilities be addressed differently? And how can the developing use of AI around the world point Britain in the right direction?
In 1981, Baudrillard published his treatise Simulacra and Simulation in which he outlines his concept of ‘hyperreality’. He defines the term by reference to the Borges short story On Exactitude in Science. In this story, the cartographers of an unnamed empire produce a map of the empire’s territory that is so detailed that it covers the entire surface of the empire itself. Over many generations, the purpose of the map is forgotten, and the map itself is left to fall into ruin. Baudrillard inverts Borges’ fable, arguing that modernity is characterized by a ‘generation of models of a real without origin or reality’. Whereas previously the territory engenders the map (the real engenders the simulated), the map now engenders the territory. Due to the kaleidoscopic refraction of reality in culture and media, the distinction between the real and the simulated is lost. They are blended into something more real than reality: hyperreality.
The growing AI economy encapsulates Baudrillard’s hyperreality. AI uses human commands to produce machine-based, simulated refractions of human reality. As the world turns ever more towards AI, we should be reminded of the fact that we are inhabiting an increasingly hyperreal existence.
Britain appears awfully close to the empire in Borges’ narrative. In obsessing over the precise extent of its territory, Britain seems to have forgotten the territory itself. In 1968, the map of the Empire took precedence over the Empire itself. Britain’s hand was swayed by geopolitical concerns about the need to establish a military presence in the Indian Ocean. The Chagos Islands were used to enable this, and the Chagossians swept aside. The imperial map covered everything. However, Britian has chosen Baudrillard’s version of the story. The map has not been forgotten and abandoned. Rather Starmer’s deal shows that Britain still wants to play the game of empire.
So, what should we do differently? We must abandon our paradoxical, geopolitical reality and accept our own hyperreality. We are not truly behind the cause of decolonization. Downing Street still thinks about the Chagos Islands as they appeared on the old pink-coloured map of the world and not as they exist today. To truly decolonize is not simply to renounce colonial gains but rather to renounce the colonial gaze. Starmer may have got the first two letters right but he has a long way to go.
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