I have a colleague at Project Ploughshares, Branka Marijan, who does excellent work on AI. I've been involved through the Centre for International Governance Innovation on examining the space-cyber nexus, and I've been the editor of a series of essays.
I think it is really important to understand that outer space is intermingled with all kinds of emerging technology. That includes cyber, AI, quantum encryption, and quantum decryption in the future. Being able to tease out the impacts that these different technologies have I think is going to be important.
A key message I have is that it's going to make conflict escalation more probable and more difficult to prevent, especially if we don't work on better communication and transparency practices, simply because things are going to start moving faster. Decision-making is going to move faster, and windows for de-escalation, for communicating and for clarifying intentions and activities might become much smaller. That's going to be problematic if we don't have good communication channels already in place with adversaries. We don't have good hotlines in place to try to clarify activities in orbit, which are necessary to interpret whether or not something is harmful, and to communicate our own senses of insecurity with regard to certain activities.
We also don't have great mechanisms for sharing a lot of the fantastic orbital information that we have in outer space beyond immediate allies, and I think that's really important for avoiding the tit-for-tat accusations that happen. As mentioned, there are concerns that Russia might be developing nuclear capabilities in space. It's hard to share information on that because it's intelligence and it's secret.
We also see accusations that come the other way, particularly from China and Russia. They accuse capabilities such as the U.S. mission extension vehicle, which is a satellite servicing capability, of being weapons. Without having information that can be accessed more broadly by the broader international community, it can be hard to differentiate these tit-for-tat accusations and know which ones are legitimate and which ones are not.