Why democracy risks becoming a casualty of technology

The audience during a presentation by the CEO of the chip manufacturer Nvidia in Berlin on October 21. Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved

Crises are becoming more unpredictable and there are no clear-cut solutions for dealing with them. Western democracies are particularly vulnerable.

The world of security policy is in turmoil due to political and military reasons, but also technological – a factor that is often overlooked. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, neurotechnology, nanotechnology and quantum computing are converging and fuelling one another, according to Jean-Marc Rickli of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

Power is shifting towards the tech giants

Rickli is a specialist in emerging global risks. He has been a professor at King’s College London and Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, and he is a member of numerous advisory boards. Technological developments, he says, also have a “democratising” effect – a term he does not use in a positive sense. This is because the threshold is also falling for criminal gangs, terrorist organisations or individual companies to use them to exert their geopolitical influence. At the same time, the owners of tech companies are becoming more powerful than most heads of state and government.

According to Rickli, a corporation such as the US chip manufacturer Nvidia now has more financial clout than a middle-income country. It ranks just behind the US, China and Germany. “Yet such firms are not accountable to the public, but only to their shareholders. And artificial intelligence does not act in the interests of humanity.”

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Why democracies are becoming more vulnerable

Attackers are now capable of simply overwhelming a state’s defence system through attacks on a massive scale, anywhere and at any time. Highly developed social welfare systems have tens of thousands of vulnerabilities. These are now being exploited almost daily.

Jean-Marc Rickli therefore considers open, democratic states to be far more at risk than dictatorships. Firstly, autocratic regimes can plan their defence with a much longer-term perspective. Secondly, they can make decisions more quickly and, if necessary, change course. A third key advantage for dictators is that they can demand much more of their population – greater hardship or more restrictions. Democratic governments, on the other hand, must balance competing interests. If they drastically cut their social, health or education spending in order to ramp up defence spending, they risk being voted out of office.

And in no democracy is there a willingness to enact laws and regulations to address future threats.

“We always wait until a problem becomes acute before we act – in other words, too late. Today, we would also have to factor in what is still considered science fiction,” says Rickli.

The new security order

The pace of technological advancement is breathtaking. According to Rickli, earlier groundbreaking inventions such as fire, electricity or the steam engine were unable to develop further on their own. Artificial intelligence, however, can and does. Are we powerless in the face of it?

“To a certain extent, yes,” says the expert.

Governments are inevitably forced to focus on ensuring, at the very least, the survival of a country and its population. The task now is to define what a state absolutely needs and to try to arm itself, at the very least, against attacks on the essentials for survival. Anything more is simply no longer possible. Not a very encouraging prospect.

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Adapted from German, sub-edited by Anand Chandrasekhar/ts

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