The 22nd Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi continued on Tuesday, September 30. While the first day was devoted primarily to issues of war and peace, the second day's discussions focused on technological and social issues.
Participants in the fifth session discussed scientific and technological sovereignty in a diversified world and concluded that such sovereignty, in its pure form, is unlikely. Despite the gradual decline of globalisation, technological chains are still intact. However, the global trend is toward dividing the world into competing technological blocs, the boundaries between which will become increasingly impermeable over time.
The United States and China are emerging as the centres of these blocs. Arvind Gupta, CEO and co-founder of the Digital India Foundation, noted that the outcome of this race remains uncertain. The United States maintains dominance in its traditional areas of leadership, primarily internet technologies. However, the battle for control over the AI technology stack is evolving differently. While the United States maintains undisputed leadership in the development of central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processors (GPUs), China poses serious competition in cloud computing and attracting investment, while India boasts a strong talent pool.
A factor limiting digital sovereignty is the technological platforms that have effectively monopolised markets. India, according to Gupta, takes an approach that is the opposite of platform-based: it has placed a premium on developing digital public infrastructure, making it an attractive example for many countries in the Global South.
According to Yuri Maximov, co-founder of the Cyberus cybersecurity development foundation and Positive Technologies, the problem lies not only in platforms but also in the digital architecture itself, which was created not to serve individuals, countries, or organisations, but to control consumers. Can this architecture be changed? Maximov is convinced that it can, and the path to this lies through rethinking approaches to cybersecurity. If countries agree on common rules with sovereign control over security, we can build a digital architecture that will ensure stability and development. But for this, according to the entrepreneur, openness is needed, and even more so, courage.
Only open cooperation can lead to success in addressing global challenges and building the future, believes Rasigan Maharajh, Director General of the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation at the Tshwane University of Technology. Even if complete technological sovereignty is impossible, decolonising technological thinking and building national competitiveness are essential.
Ruslan Yunusov, co-founder of the Russian Quantum Centre, divided countries into four categories based on their position in the technological race. The most financially profitable, but strategically disadvantageous category is dependence. Integration into technological chains requires significant investment in science, research and development. Sovereignty means even higher capital expenditures, but a limited market. Geopolitical advantages clearly outweigh economic ones. Finally, dominance, which implies the extension of technological policy to other markets, provides the opportunity to recoup capital expenditures many times over. According to Yunusov, it is most advantageous for Russia to seek a middle ground between national interests and market access, because in pursuing technological sovereignty, we could strategically lose out on economic efficiency.
One high-tech area where Russia has undisputed leadership is nuclear energy, said Anton Khlopkov, Director of the Centre for Energy and Security. Most new power units are being commissioned in China, Russia, and South Korea, but technological sovereignty can only be considered in the first two cases. Despite ongoing cooperation in nuclear energy, Western countries have committed to rejecting Russian nuclear fuel, and Chinese companies are barred from their markets. So, the peaceful nuclear energy sector is experiencing the same kind of division as other technological fields. Moreover, according to Khlopkov, the US is demanding that countries entering the industry immediately renounce their technological sovereignty—in particular, the right to potentially develop uranium enrichment technologies. But so far, this approach has been unsuccessful—most countries considering cooperation with the US in nuclear energy refuse to work with it under such conditions.
The second day of the Annual Meeting continued with meetings between participants and representatives of Russian government agencies. The participants discussed current global issues with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and spoke about the governance of a modern metropolis with Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin.
The sixth session, dedicated to artificial intelligence, continued the discussion of technology in a multipolar world. According to one participant, large language models (and at the user level, this is the most accessible example of AI technology) are not neutral tools, but rather reflections of cultural paradigms and carriers of civilisational projects. Thus, we are dealing with hidden cultural expansion and the transfer of cultural code. All this raises the question of the need for AI sovereignty. Experts believe that AI developers must respect cultural diversity and prevent the dominance of any one paradigm. Users must be able to choose between worldviews.
Revisiting the issue of technological sovereignty, session participants acknowledged that all countries are, and will continue to be, dependent on production chains. However, they can and should strive for autonomy in managing digital transformation and shaping digital ecosystems.
During the seventh session, the annual meeting participants discussed the challenges of migration, which is the quintessence of imbalances and inequalities in the world. Modern capitalism, with its deeply integrated labour and capital markets, is a powerful driver of migration. However, the migration flows it creates are increasingly becoming a source of acute domestic political tension in recipient countries.
According to one participant, the widespread belief that migrants flock exclusively to countries with developed social systems in order to receive benefits is quite simplistic. Throughout history, people have migrated primarily to where they saw the greatest opportunities for realising their potential. Today, this is clearly demonstrated by the constant and powerful migration flow to the United States—a country with a relatively underdeveloped social system, but with a capacious labour market and high potential for upward mobility.
Contrary to forecasts, in the foreseeable future automation technologies will not be able to completely replace migrants engaged in low-skilled labour. This is especially true for sectors critical to post-industrial economies but requiring "human interaction"—nannies, caregivers, and social workers. These professions, despite their importance, often remain unattractive to local populations, creating a structural demand for foreign labour.
Overall, the session participants concluded that migration creates serious management challenges with no universal solutions and will remain a determining factor in global socio-political dynamics.
