Pennings, A.J. (2026, May 26) The ICT4SD and World Order Assignment. apennings.com https://apennings.com/technologies-of-meaning/the-ict4sd-and-world-order-assignment/

Note: This is an introduction to a collection of student articles for a pdf book tentatively called ICT4D and the Future of Global Sustainability.

Introduction

A foundational course like EST 230 – Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainable Development (ICT4SD), and increasingly project initiatives such as AI for Good (AI4Good), cannot operate in an ecological, economic, or political vacuum. True mastery of international development assistance requires a grounding in the realities of global power and the organization of the world order. Specifically, understanding the politics of the US dollar global infrastructure (USD), energy (oil and its alternatives), and technological competition is crucial to the unfolding of sustainable abundance and development.

To understand these dynamics, students in the ICT4D specialization of our BS in Technological Systems Management benefit from analyzing different perspectives. They were asked to compare and contrast two highly influential, yet philosophically opposed thinkers: Jeffrey Sachs, a university professor and institutionalist champion of global cooperation, and Peter Zeihan, a geopolitical analyst and structural determinist focused on demographic and geographic realities. Both are very popular keynote speakers and YouTube guests. Both are accomplished writers on geopolitical issues and tensions.

Biographies & Views

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned American economist, academic, and public policy analyst. Born in 1954, he earned his BA, MA, and PhD from Harvard University, rising from a first-year student to a tenured full professor in 11 years.[1] In 2002, he moved to the faculty of Columbia University, where he served as the Director of The Earth Institute.[2] He currently serves as the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Early in his career, Sachs became famous for advising governments in Latin America (such as Bolivia), and later Eastern Europe (Poland), and the former Soviet Union. In the wake of the “Third World Debt Crisis,” these countries experienced severe hyperinflation and economic collapse. The oil crises of the 1970s drove many countries into excessive borrowing from the global Eurodollar markets. The subsequent interest rate hike by Paul Volcker’s Federal Reserve sent interest rates skyrocketing in the 1980s making repayment difficult. Sachs aided macroeconomic stabilization in Latin America and the transitions from Communism to market economies with government cuts and austerity programs that came to be known as “shock therapy.”[1,2] The most dramatic transition was the end of the USSR in 1991 as oil prices collapsed and debt repayments ended. Sachs absorbed many bitter lessons.

Over the past two decades, his focus shifted fundamentally toward poverty alleviation and sustainable development. Sachs became a Special Advisor to United Nations Secretaries-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Ban Ki-moon on the transition to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).[2] He was one of their primary architects and their most prominent global champion. His work spans from the early conceptual transition out of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to his leadership in tracking, financing, and modernizing the 17 SDG goals using digital and data-driven solutions.

We use Sachs’s “ICT & SDGs Final Report: How Information and Communications Technology can Accelerate Action on the Sustainable Development Goals” book in our course.[9] It was written with support from Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson and views broadband and ICT integration with the SDGs enabling solutions such as mobile money, digital health clinics, and localized energy grids as crucial tools to bypass traditional, slow “Business-as-Usual” steps. The goal is to use ICT to allow impoverished nations to leapfrog into sustainable economic and energy systems.

Sachs provides a crucial framework for sustainability, ICT4D, and AI4Good because he argues that global poverty and environmental degradation are solvable through deliberate institutional investment and targeted technology transfer.[3,2] Sustainability, ICT4D, and AI initiatives are highly capital-intensive. They rely heavily on investments through the architecture of the global financial system, which is fundamentally underpinned by the USD (US dollar plus Eurodollars) but suffers from persistent shortages and capital flight.

Sachs argues that the current international financial architecture fails the Global South. He argues that developing nations are trapped in structural disadvantages because they have been largely excluded from USD liquidity due to excessively high interest rates compared to wealthy nations, preventing them from financing their own green transitions or digital infrastructure.[4] He has advocated for reforming the IMF and World Bank to unlock concessionary capital that would be vital for any realistic execution of global ICT4SD and AI4Good initiatives.

Peter Zeihan is a contemporary American geopolitical strategist, author, and speaker. Born in 1973, Zeihan took a non-traditional academic route to global prominence, unlike career academics. He earned his master’s degree from the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky and has a post-graduate diploma in Asia Studies from the University of Otago in New Zealand. He spent over a decade (from 2000 to 2012) at Stratfor (Strategic Forecasting, Inc.), a premier private intelligence and geopolitical analysis firm in Austin, Texas. He eventually rose to the position of Vice President of Analysis before starting his own consultancy.[5] Stratfor, which was started by George Frieden (Geopolitical Futures) and other professors from LSU, is now owned by the RANE Network.[6]

In 2012, he founded his own independent firm, Zeihan on Geopolitics, where he advises corporate executives, military leaders, and government organizations. He has authored several bestselling books, including The Accidental Superpower (2014) and The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization (2022), which accurately predicted major shifts in global supply chain disruptions and energy security that appeared after the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[5,7]

Zeihan offers a stark, cold, and highly pragmatic counterweight to institutional optimism. His structural determinism focuses on geography, demographics, and physical security, presenting hard truths that tech developers must consider.[5,7] His core thesis is that the global free-trade order (the Bretton Woods system) was a historical anomaly guaranteed solely by the US Navy to fight the Cold War.[5] As the US pulls back from policing global sea lanes, international trade will fragment.

For an ICT4D/AI curriculum, these are indispensable lessons. If global supply chains break down or transportation becomes threatened, the localized utilization of semiconductors, digital devices, fiber-optic cables, and green-energy hardware will stop or become prohibitively expensive for most nations.

Zeihan emphasizes that we still live in a world in which things must be physically moved from where they are produced to where they are consumed. He tracks how nations with rapidly aging populations face terminal economic contraction, and how localized geography dictates whether a country can survive an energy crisis.[7]

Populations economically provide consumption, investment, and labor. His perspective forces AI and sustainability students to confront demographic and physical limitations. You cannot implement an “AI solution” in a country that lacks a creative and energetic workforce needed to maintain a high-tech economy. It includes avid customers, investors, and intelligent know-how. Also, you cannot adequately develop without the naval capability or protection to secure energy imports or commodity exports.

The Tension

For Sachs, a multipolar world is an opportunity to build a fairer global system. He points out that the rise of China, the expansion of the BRICS bloc, and the economic dynamism of East Asia mean that technological and financial capacity is no longer consolidated in the West.

Sachs believes that if nations move past the quest for dominance, this new multipolar landscape can leverage global cooperation to deploy AI, digital public infrastructure, and clean energy to address systemic issues such as climate change and poverty. He strongly advocates shifting international governance within the UN to a super-majority voting system, removing unilateral vetoes, and opening multilateral finance to the Global South.

Zeihan treats Sachs’s vision of peaceful multipolar cooperation as a dangerous fantasy. He asserts that without the US Navy policing the high seas, global trade lanes will fragment, and maritime piracy or state-sponsored resource hoarding will return. Zeihan warns that true deglobalization will lead to localized “de-industrialization, de-urbanization, and depopulation.”

He points out that countries with terrible demographics (like rapidly aging populations in China, Russia, and parts of Europe) and those structurally dependent on long-range imports for food and energy face systemic collapse. In Zeihan’s multipolar world, only a few geographically secure, demographically stable, resource-abundant nations (principally the United States, alongside localized and preffered partners) will maintain advanced industrial capabilities. In contrast, the rest of the world faces severe resource scarcity.

Why This Matters for Sustainability, ICT4D, and AI4Good

This clash highlights the exact friction points students in international development must anticipate. If Sachs is right, the primary barrier to AI4Good and global sustainability is political will and institutional design. Developers should focus on global policy frameworks, open-source technology transfers, and lobbying multilateral banks to fund clean energy and digital infrastructure in the Global South.

If Zeihan is right, the primary barrier is physical vulnerability. An AI system or localized tech intervention is useless if the server farms lack electricity due to regional oil blockades or a lack of solar panels and windmills. ICT will not present sufficient solutions if the country cannot import the physical semiconductors and routing technologies required to maintain its data centers and wireless broadband networks. Advanced AI infrastructure requires specialized hardware such as GPUs manufactured via highly consolidated, multi-country supply chains (such as TSMC in Taiwan using ASML lithography from the Netherlands). These transactions are settled predominantly in USD. A country’s access to “AI for Good” models is gated by its balance of payments and macroeconomic stability.

AI and ICT4D are deeply anchored in the physical world and bound by energy and financial constraints. Sachs argues that advanced software architectures for health, education, and public administration must be treated as “Global Public Goods,” because software can be replicated at nearly zero marginal cost.[8] To make his tech-enhanced world a reality, he advocates for a radical shift in UN voting and multilateral funding (via the World Bank, IMF, and international private capital) to grant low-interest loans directly targeted at expanding digital hardware, 5G towers, and compute capabilities across the Global South.

Either Sachs’s vision of global institutional redesign is achieved or developers must design “low-infrastructure, hyper-localized, and decoupled” systems that can survive the structural breakdown of global trade.

References

Berg, A. (2024). Jeffrey D. Sachs (1954–). The Palgrave Companion to Harvard Economics, 999-1021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52053-2_40
Farhat–Holzman, Laina (2017) “Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder. Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2014.,” Comparative Civilizations Review: Vol. 76: No. 76, Article 24.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol76/iss76/24
Galjak, M. (2023). Peter Zeihan – The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization. Demografija, (20), 115-118.
Kahn, M. E. (2015). A Review of The Age of Sustainable Development by Jeffrey Sachs. Journal of Economic Literature, 53(3), 654-666. https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.53.3.654
Sachs, J. D. (n.d.). ICT & SDGs Final Report: How Information and Communications Technology can Accelerate Action on the Sustainable Development Goals in our course.
https://www.oneworld.net/sites/default/files/resources/2016-06/ict-sdg.pdf
Snowdon, B. (2005). A Global Compact to End Poverty: Jeffrey Sachs interviewed by Brian Snowdon. World Economics, 6(4), 11-58.

Notes

[1] Berg, A. (2024). Jeffrey D. Sachs (1954–). A Global Compact to End Poverty: Jeffrey Sachs interviewed by Brian Snowdon. World Economics, 6(4), 11-58.
[3]Kahn, M. E. (2015). A Review of The Age of Sustainable Development by Jeffrey Sachs. Journal of Economic Literature, 53(3), 654-666. https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.53.3.654
[4] Pennings, A.J. (2026, Apr 12) USD Liquidity: A Tiered Hierarchy Model and Implications for AI4Good and ICT4D. apennings.com https://apennings.com/characteristics-of-digital-media/usd-liquidity-a-tiered-liquidity-hierarchy-model-and-implications-for-ai4good-and-ict4d/
[5] Farhat–Holzman, Laina (2017) “Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder. Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2014.,” Comparative Civilizations Review: Vol. 76: No. 76, Article 24.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol76/iss76/24
[6] Kullik, Jakob. “George Friedman: The Next 100 Years. A Forecast for the 21st Century. Anchor Books/Random House: New York 2010, 253 Seiten” SIRIUS – Zeitschrift für Strategische Analysen, vol. 8, no. 2, 2024, pp. 244-246. https://doi.org/10.1515/sirius-2024-2015
[7] Galjak, M. (2023). Peter Zeihan – The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization. Demografija, (20), 115-118.[5,7]
[8] This study was commissioned by the Development
Financing 2000 project within the Swedish Ministry for
Foreign Affairs https://eba.se/app/uploads/2021/04/2001.2-Financing-and-Providing-Global-Public-Goods-Expectations-and-Prospects.pdf
Prompt(s)
[9] Sachs, J. D. (2015). ICT & SDGs Final Report: How Information and Communications Technology can Accelerate Action on the Sustainable Development Goals in our course.

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Not to be considered financial advice. AI is often used, and results are thoroughly interrogated. Links are used for some citations.

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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea and a Research Professor for Stony Brook University. He teaches AI and broadband policy. From 2002-2012 he taught digital economics and information systems management at New York University. He also taught in the Digital Media MBA at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, where he lives when not in Korea.

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Category: artificial intelligence, books and films, creative industries, cryptocurrencies, democratic political economies, enabling frameworks, public administration, science and technology studies, smart new deal, spreadsheet logic, sustainable development, technologies of meaning
Tags: AI4Good > ICT4SD > public goods

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