At first blush, stirrups may not seem all that revolutionary. They are, after all, fairly rudimentary triangles of metal attached to leather straps and a horse’s saddle. Look a bit closer, and another picture emerges.
Before the stirrup, a cavalry’s battlefield impact was surprisingly limited. Well-organized defensive shield walls could generally beat back a horse-led charge. Because riders weren’t fixed to their horses, they were vulnerable. Soldiers armed with long spears and large shields, standing in tightly drilled lines, could dismount even the heaviest cavalry. As a result, the primary function of your horse was in transporting you to the battlefield.
The stirrup revolutionized all that. It fixed the spear and rider to the charging animal, making them a single unit. The full force of the spear was now the combined power of the horse and the knight. Hitting a shield no longer meant you fell off; it meant you smashed the shield and the person holding it. Suddenly, galloping at full speed, lances out, riders fixed, a heavy cavalry charge was an overwhelming shock tactic. It could break even the staunchest of infantry lines.
This tiny innovation tipped the balance of power in favor of offense. Soon after the stirrup was introduced into Europe, Charles Martel, leader of the Franks, saw its potential. Using it to devastating effect, he defeated and expelled the Saracens from France. But the introduction of these heavy cavalry units required immense supporting changes in Frankish society. Horses were hungry and expensive. Heavy cavalry required long years of training. In response, Martel and his heirs expropriated church lands and used them to raise a warrior elite. Their newfound wealth let them maintain horses, freed them to train, tied them into the kingdom, and, later, gave them funds to purchase armor. In return for their new wealth and status that elite promised to keep arms and fight for the king. Another grand bargain was struck.
Over time this improvised pact grew into an elaborate system of feudalism, with networks of obligations to liege lords and an immense stratum of bonded serfs. This was a world of estates and titles, jousting tournaments and apprenticeships, blacksmiths and artisans, armor and castles, a self-conscious culture of heraldic imagery and romantic stories of knightly courage. It became the dominant political form of the entire medieval period.
The stirrup was an apparently simple innovation. But with it came a social revolution changing hundreds of millions of lives. A system of politics, economics, war, and culture that structured European life for nearly a thousand years rested, in part, on those small metallic triangles. The story of stirrups and feudalism highlights an important truth: new technologies help create new centers of power with new social infrastructures both enabling them and supporting them. In the last chapter we saw how this process today adds to a series of immediate challenges facing the nation-state. But over the longer term, the implications of power’s plummeting costs are tectonic, techno-political earthquakes shaking the ground upon which the state is built.
While small changes in technology can fundamentally alter the balance of power, trying to predict exactly how, decades into the future, is incredibly difficult. Exponential technologies amplify everyone and everything. And that creates seemingly contradictory trends. Power is both concentrated and dispersed. Incumbents are both strengthened and weakened. Nation-states are both more fragile and at greater risk of slipping into abuses of unchecked power.
Recall that growing access to power means everyone’s power will be amplified. In the coming decades, historical patterns will play out once again, new centers will form, new infrastructures develop, new forms of governance and social organization emerge. At the same time, existing loci of power will be amplified in unpredictable ways. Sometimes, when one reads about technology, there is a heady sense that it will sweep away all that has come before, that no older businesses or institutions will survive the whirlwind. I don’t think that’s true; some will be swept away, but many will be augmented. Television can broadcast the revolution, but it can also help erase it. Technologies can reinforce social structures, hierarchies, and regimes of control as well as upend them.
In the resulting turbulence, without a major shift in focus, many open democratic states face a steady decay of their institutional foundations, a withering of legitimacy and authority. This is a circular dynamic of technology spreading and power shifting, which undermines the foundations, dents the capacity to rein it in, and so leads to further spread. At the same time, authoritarian states are given a potent new arsenal of repression.
The nation-state will be subject to massive centrifugal and centripetal forces, centralization and fragmentation. It’s a fast track to chaos, calling into question who makes decisions and how; how those decisions are executed, by whom, when, and where, pressurizing those delicate balances and accommodations toward the breaking point. This recipe for turbulence will create epic new concentrations and dispersals of power, splintering the state from above and below. It will ultimately cast doubt on the viability of some nations altogether.
This ungovernable “post-sovereign” world, in the words of the political scientist Wendy Brown, will go far beyond a sense of near-term fragility; it will be instead a long-term macro-trend toward deep instability grinding away over decades. The first result will be massive new concentrations of power and wealth that reorder society.
From the Mongols to the Mughals, for more than a thousand years the most powerful force in Asia was a traditional empire. By 1800 that had changed. It was rather a private company, owned by a relatively small number of shareholders, run by a handful of dusty accountants and administrators operating out of a building just five windows wide in a city thousands of miles away.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company controlled huge swaths of the Indian subcontinent. It ruled more land and people than existed in all of Europe, collecting taxes and setting laws. It commanded a well-drilled standing army of 200,000 men, twice as large as Britain’s own army at home, and operated the world’s largest mercantile fleet. Its collective firepower was greater than that of any state in Asia. Its global trading relationships were fundamental in everything from the foundation of Hong Kong to the Boston Tea Party. Its customs, duties, and dividends were critical to the British economy; no less than half of Britain’s foreign trade at the time ran through the company.
This was clearly no ordinary corporation. In truth it was a kind of empire. It’s difficult to conceive of a company like this in modern terms. We are not quite heading for a neocolonial East India Company 2.0. But I do think we have to confront the sheer scale and influence that some boardrooms have not just over the subtle nudges and choice architectures that shape culture and politics today but, more importantly, over where this could lead in decades to come. They are empires of a sort, and with the coming wave their scale, influence, and capability are set to radically expand.
People often like to measure progress in AI by comparing it with how well an individual human can perform a certain task. Researchers talk about achieving superhuman performance in language translation, or on real-world tasks like driving. But what this misses is that the most powerful forces in the world are actually groups of individuals coordinating to achieve shared goals. Organizations too are a kind of intelligence. Companies, militaries, bureaucracies, even markets—these are artificial intelligences, aggregating and processing huge amounts of data, organizing themselves around specific goals, building mechanisms to get better and better at achieving those goals. Indeed, machine intelligence resembles a massive bureaucracy far more than it does a human mind. When we talk about something like AI having an enormous impact on the world, it’s worth bearing in mind just how far-reaching these old-fashioned AIs are.
What happens when many, perhaps the majority, of the tasks required to operate a corporation, or a government department, can be run more efficiently by machines? Who will benefit first from these dynamics, and what will they likely do with this new power?
We are already in an era where megacorporations have trillion-dollar valuations and more assets, in every sense, than entire countries. Take Apple. It has produced one of the most beautiful, influential, and widely used products in the history of our species. The iPhone is genius. With its product used by more than 1.2 billion people worldwide, the company has deservedly collected rich rewards for its success: in 2022, Apple was valued at more than all the companies listed on the U.K.’s FTSE 100 stock exchange combined. With close to $200 billion of cash and investments in the bank and a captive audience largely locked into its ecosystem, Apple seems well placed to take advantage of this new wave.
Similarly, a vast span of services, from very different sectors, across huge parts of the planet, have been collapsed into a single corporation, Google: mapping and location, reviews and business listings, advertising, video streaming, office tools, calendars, email, photo storage, videoconferencing, and so on. Big tech companies provide tools for everything from organizing a birthday to running multimillion-dollar businesses. The only equivalent organizations, touching so deeply into the lives of so many, are national governments. Call it “Googlization”: a range of services provided for free or at low cost leading to single entities functionally enabling massive sections of the economy and human experience.
To get a sense of these concentrations, consider that the combined revenues of companies in Fortune’s Global 500 are already at 44 percent of world GDP. Their total profits are larger than all but the top six countries’ annual GDPs. Companies already control the largest clusters of AI processors, the best models, the most advanced quantum computers, and the overwhelming majority of robotics capacity and IP. Unlike with rockets, satellites, and the internet, the frontier of this wave is found in corporations, not in government organizations or academic labs. Accelerate this process with the next generation of technology, and a future of corporate concentration doesn’t seem so extraordinary.
There is already a pronounced and accelerating “superstar” effect, where leading players take ever more outsized shares of the pie. The world’s top fifty cities have the lion’s share of wealth and corporate power (45 percent of big company HQs; 21 percent of world GDP) despite having only 8 percent of the world’s population. The top 10 percent of global firms take 80 percent of the total profits. Expect the coming wave to feed into this picture, producing ever-richer and more successful superstars—whether regions, business sectors, companies, or research groups.
I think we’ll see a group of private corporations grow beyond the size and reach of many nation-states. Consider the outsized influence of a sprawling corporate empire like the Samsung Group in South Korea. Founded as a noodle shop almost a century ago, it became a major conglomerate after the Korean War. As Korean growth accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s, Samsung was at the heart of it, not only a diversified manufacturing powerhouse but a major player in banking and insurance. The Korean economic miracle was a Samsung-powered miracle. By this point Samsung was the leading chaebol, the name given to a small group of massive firms dominating the country.
Smartphones, semiconductors, and TVs are Samsung specialties. But so too are life insurance, ferry operators, and theme parks. Careers at Samsung are enormously prized. Samsung Group revenue represents up to 20 percent of the Korean economy. For Koreans today, Samsung is almost like a parallel government, a constant presence throughout people’s lives. Given the dense network of interests and ongoing corporate and governmental scandals, the balance of power between the state and the corporation is precarious and fuzzy.
Samsung and Korea are outliers but perhaps not for much longer. Given the range of concentrated capabilities, things typically the province of governments today, like education and defense, perhaps even currency or law enforcement, could be provided by this new generation of companies. Already, for example, eBay and PayPal’s dispute resolution system handles around sixty million disagreements a year, three times as many as the entire U.S. legal system. Ninety percent of these disputes are settled using technology alone. There’s more to come.
Technology has already created modern empires, of a sort. The coming wave rapidly accelerates this trend, putting immense power and riches into the hands of those who create and control it. New, private interests will step into spaces vacated by overstretched and strained governments. This process won’t, like the East India Company, come enforced at the barrel of a musket, but it will, exactly like the East India Company, create private companies with the scale, reach, and power of governments. Those companies with the cash, expertise, and distribution to take advantage of the coming wave, to greatly augment their intelligence and simultaneously extend their reach, will see colossal gains.
In the last wave, things dematerialized; goods became services. You don’t buy software or music on CDs anymore; it’s streamed. You just expect antivirus and security software as a by-product of using Google or Apple. Products break, get obsolete. Services less so. They are seamless and easy to use. For their part, companies are eager for you to subscribe to their software ecosystems; regular payments are alluring. All the big tech platforms either are mainly service businesses or have very large service businesses. Apple has the App Store, despite primarily selling devices, and Amazon, while operating as the world’s biggest retailer of physical goods, also provides e-commerce services to merchants and TV streaming to individuals, and hosts a good chunk of the internet on its cloud offering, Amazon Web Services.
Everywhere you look, technology accelerates this dematerialization, reducing complexity for the end consumer by providing continuous consumption services rather than traditional buy-once products. Whether it’s services like Uber, DoorDash, and Airbnb, or open publishing platforms like Instagram and TikTok, the drift of mega-businesses is toward not participating in the market but being the market, not making the product but operating the service. The question now becomes, what else could be made into a service, collapsed into the existing suite of another mega-business?
In a few decades, I predict most physical products will look like services. Zero marginal cost production and distribution will make it possible. The migration to the cloud will become all-encompassing, and the trend will be spurred by the ascendancy of low-code and no-code software, the rise of bio-manufacturing, and the boom in 3-D printing. When you combine all the facets of the coming wave, from the design, management, and logistical capabilities of AI to the modeling of chemical reactions enabled by quantum computing to the fine-grained assembly capabilities of robotics, you get a wholesale revolution in the nature of production.
Foods, drugs, home products, indeed almost anything might be 3-D printed, or bio-produced, or made using atomically precise manufacturing close to or at the site of use, governed by sophisticated AIs fluidly working with customers using natural language. You simply buy the execution code and let an AI or robot do the task or create the product. Yes, this glosses over a hideous mass of material complexity, and yes, it’s a long way off. But squint into the distance, and this scenario is clearly plausible. Even if you don’t buy the whole argument here, it seems impossible that these forces will not create major changes and new concentrations of value throughout the global economic supply chain.
Meeting demand for cheap and seamless services usually requires scale (massive up-front investment in chips, people, security, innovation), which rewards and accelerates centralization. In this scenario there will be just a few mega-players whose scale and power will begin to rival traditional states. What’s more, owners of the best systems may be able to establish an immense competitive advantage. Those huge centralized coming-wave firms I just mentioned? They likely end up bigger, richer, and more entrenched than businesses in the past.
The more that systems successfully generalize across sector after sector, the more that power and wealth concentrates with their owners. Those with the resources to invent or adopt new technologies fastest—those that can pass my updated Turing test, for example—will enjoy rapidly compounding returns. Their systems have more data and “real-world deployment experience” and so work better, generalize faster, and lock in the advantage, sucking in the best talent to build them. An unbridgeable “intelligence gap” becomes plausible. If one organization gets far enough ahead, it might become a revenue generator and ultimately a power center without parallel. If that process extends to something like full AGI or quantum supremacy, it could make things very difficult for new entrants or indeed governments.
Whatever the end point, we are heading to a place where unprecedented powers and abilities are out there, in the hands of already powerful actors who’ll no doubt use them to amplify their reach and further their own agenda.
Such concentrations will enable vast, automated megacorporations to transfer value away from human capital—work—and toward raw capital. Put all the inequalities resulting from concentration together, and it adds up to another great acceleration and structural deepening of an existing fracture. Little wonder there is talk of neo- or techno-feudalism—a direct challenge to the social order, this time built on something beyond even stirrups.
In sum, returns on intelligence will compound exponentially. A select few artificial intelligences that we used to call organizations will massively benefit from a new concentration of ability—probably the greatest such concentration yet seen. Re-creating the essence of what’s made our species so successful into tools that can be reused and reapplied over and over, in myriad different settings, is a mighty prize, which corporations and bureaucracies of all kinds will pursue, and wield. How these entities are governed, how they will rub against, capture, and reengineer the state, is an open question. That they will challenge it seems certain.
But the consequences of greater concentrations of power don’t end with corporations.
When compared with superstar corporations, governments appear slow, bloated, and out of touch. It’s tempting to dismiss them as headed for the trash can of history. However, another inevitable reaction of nation-states will be to use the tools of the coming wave to tighten their grip on power, taking full advantage to entrench their dominance.
In the twentieth century, totalitarian regimes wanted planned economies, obedient populations, and controlled information ecosystems. They wanted complete hegemony. Every aspect of life was managed. Five-year plans dictated everything from the number and content of films to bushels of wheat expected from a given field. High modernist planners hoped to create pristine cities of stark order and flow. An ever-watchful and ruthless security apparatus kept it all ticking over. Power concentrated in the hands of a single supreme leader, capable of surveying the entire picture and acting decisively. Think Soviet collectivization, Stalin’s five-year plans, Mao’s China, East Germany’s Stasi. This is government as dystopian nightmare.
And so far at least, it has always gone disastrously wrong. Despite the best efforts of revolutionaries and bureaucrats alike, society could not be bent into shape; it was never fully “legible” to the state, but a messy, ungovernable reality that would not conform with the purist dreams of the center. Humanity is too multifarious, too impulsive to be boxed in like this. In the past, the tools available to totalitarian governments simply weren’t equal to the task. So those governments failed; they failed to improve quality of life, or eventually they collapsed or reformed. Extreme concentration wasn’t just highly undesirable; it was practically impossible.
The coming wave presents the disturbing possibility that this may no longer be true. Instead, it could initiate an injection of centralized power and control that will morph state functions into repressive distortions of their original purpose. Rocket fuel for authoritarians and for great power competition alike. The ability to capture and harness data at an extraordinary scale and precision; to create territory-spanning systems of surveillance and control, reacting in real time; to put, in other words, history’s most powerful set of technologies under the command of a single body, would rewrite the limits of state power so comprehensively that it would produce a new kind of entity altogether.
Your smart speaker wakes you up. Immediately you turn to your phone and check your emails. Your smart watch tells you you’ve had a normal night’s sleep and your heart rate is average for the morning. Already a distant organization knows, in theory, what time you are awake, how you are feeling, and what you are looking at. You leave the house and head to the office, your phone tracking your movements, logging the keystrokes on your text messages and the podcast you listen to. On the way, and throughout the day, you are captured on CCTV hundreds of times. After all, this city has at least one camera for every ten people, maybe many more than that. When you swipe in at the office, the system notes your time of entry. Software installed on your computer monitors productivity down to eye movements.
On the way home you stop to buy dinner. The supermarket’s loyalty scheme tracks your purchases. After eating, you binge-stream another TV series; your viewing habits are duly noted. Every glance, every hurried message, every half thought registered in an open browser or fleeting search, every step through bustling city streets, every heartbeat and bad night’s sleep, every purchase made or backed out of—it is all captured, watched, tabulated. And this is only a tiny slice of the possible data harvested every day, not just at work or on the phone, but at the doctor’s office or in the gym. Almost every detail of life is logged, somewhere, by those with the sophistication to process and act on the data they collect. This is not some far-off dystopia. I’m describing daily reality for millions in a city like London.
The only step left is bringing these disparate databases together into a single, integrated system: a perfect twenty-first-century surveillance apparatus. The preeminent example is, of course, China. That’s hardly news, but what’s become clear is how advanced and ambitious the party’s program already is, let alone where it might end up in twenty or thirty years.
Compared with the West, Chinese research into AI concentrates on areas of surveillance like object tracking, scene understanding, and voice or action recognition. Surveillance technologies are ubiquitous, increasingly granular in their ability to home in on every aspect of citizens’ lives. They combine visual recognition of faces, gaits, and license plates with data collection—including bio-data—on a mass scale. Centralized services like WeChat bundle everything from private messaging to shopping and banking in one easily traceable place. Drive the highways of China, and you’ll notice hundreds of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras tracking vehicles. (These exist in most large urban areas in the Western world, too.) During COVID quarantines, robot dogs and drones carried speakers blasting messages warning people to stay inside.
Facial recognition software builds on the advances in computer vision we saw in part 2, identifying individual faces with exquisite accuracy. When I open my phone, it starts automatically upon “seeing” my face: a small but slick convenience, but with obvious and profound implications. Although the system was initially developed by corporate and academic researchers in the United States, nowhere embraced or perfected the technology more than China.
Chairman Mao had said “the people have sharp eyes” when watching their neighbors for infractions against communist orthodoxy. By 2015 this was the inspiration for a massive “Sharp Eyes” facial recognition program that ultimately aspired to roll such surveillance out across no less than 100 percent of public space. A team of leading researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong went on to found SenseTime, one of the world’s largest facial recognition companies, built on a database of more than two billion faces. China is now the leader in facial recognition technologies, with giant companies like Megvii and CloudWalk vying with SenseTime for market share. Chinese police even have sunglasses with built-in facial recognition technology capable of tracking suspects in crowds.
Around half the world’s billion CCTV cameras are in China. Many have built-in facial recognition and are carefully positioned to gather maximal information, often in quasi-private spaces: residential buildings, hotels, even karaoke lounges. A New York Times investigation found the police in Fujian Province alone estimated they held a database of 2.5 billion facial images. They were candid about its purpose: “controlling and managing people.” Authorities are also looking to suck in audio data—police in the city of Zhongshan wanted cameras that could record audio within a three-hundred-foot radius—and close monitoring and storage of bio-data became routine in the COVID era.
The Ministry of Public Security is clear on the next priority: stitch these scattered databases and services into a coherent whole, from license plates to DNA, WeChat accounts to credit cards. This AI-enabled system could spot emerging threats to the CCP like dissenters and protests in real time, allowing for a seamless, crushing government response to anything it perceived as undesirable. Nowhere does this come together with more horrifying potential than in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
This rugged and remote part of northwest China has seen the systematic and technologically empowered repression and ethnic cleansing of its native Uighur people. All these systems of monitoring and control are brought together here. Cities are placed under blankets of camera surveillance with facial recognition and AI tracking. Checkpoints and “reeducation” camps govern movements and freedoms. A system of social credit scores based on numerous surveilled databases keeps tabs on the population. Authorities have built an iris-scan database that has the capacity to hold up to thirty million samples—more than the region’s population.
Societies of overweening surveillance and control are already here, and now all of this is set to escalate enormously into a next-level concentration of power at the center. Yet it would be a mistake to write this off as just a Chinese or authoritarian problem. For a start, this tech is being exported wholesale to places like Venezuela and Zimbabwe, Ecuador and Ethiopia. Even to the United States. In 2019, the U.S. government banned federal agencies and their contractors from buying telecommunications and surveillance equipment from a number of Chinese providers including Huawei, ZTE, and Hikvision. Yet, just a year later, three federal agencies were found to have bought such equipment from prohibited vendors. More than one hundred U.S. towns have even acquired technology developed for use on the Uighurs in Xinjiang. A textbook failure of containment.
Western firms and governments are also in the vanguard of building and deploying this tech. Invoking London above was no accident: it competes with cities like Shenzhen for most surveilled in the world. It’s no secret that governments monitor and control their own populations, but these tendencies extend deep into Western firms, too. In smart warehouses every micromovement of every worker is tracked down to body temperature and loo breaks. Companies like Vigilant Solutions aggregate movement data based on license plate tracking, then sell it to jurisdictions like state or municipal governments. Even your take-out pizza is being watched: Domino’s uses AI-powered cameras to check its pies. Just as much as anyone in China, those in the West leave a vast data exhaust every day of their lives. And just as in China, it is harvested, processed, operationalized, and sold.
Before the coming wave the notion of a global “high-tech panopticon” was the stuff of dystopian novels, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We or George Orwell’s 1984. The panopticon is becoming possible. Billions of devices and trillions of data points could be operated and monitored at once, in real time, used not just for surveillance but for prediction. Not only will it foresee social outcomes with precision and granularity, but it might also subtly or overtly steer or coerce them, from grand macro-processes like election results down to individual consumer behaviors.
This raises the prospect of totalitarianism to a new plane. It won’t happen everywhere, and not all at once. But if AI, biotech, quantum, robotics, and the rest of it are centralized in the hands of a repressive state, the resulting entity would be palpably different from any yet seen. In the next chapter we will return to this possibility. However, before then comes another trend. One completely, and paradoxically, at odds with centralization.
Hear the word “Hezbollah” and for most people it doesn’t suggest parliaments, schools, and hospitals. This is, after all, a militant organization born of the long tragedy of Lebanon’s civil war, with a track record of violence, officially classed as terrorist by the U.S. government and often acting as a proxy for Iranian interests. But there’s a lot more happening here, and it hints at an alternative direction for power and the state.
In its Lebanese home territory, Hezbollah operates as a Shiite “state within a state.” There’s the sizable and notorious military wing. It may be the best-armed non-state actor in the world, with, in the words of one analyst, “a larger arsenal of artillery than most nations.” It has drones, tanks, long-range rockets, and many thousands of foot soldiers who’ve fought alongside the Assad regime in the Syrian civil war and regularly engaged Israel.
Perhaps to the surprise of some, Hezbollah is also a major mainstream political force, a conventional party in the ongoing psychodrama that is the Lebanese government. It is in many ways just another part of the political system, building alliances, drafting laws, and working with the conventional instruments of state. Its members sit on local municipal councils and in parliament and hold ministerial cabinet positions. Across the large swaths of Lebanese territory it controls, Hezbollah operates schools, hospitals, health-care centers, infrastructure, water projects, and microcredit-lending initiatives. Indeed, some of these programs even have the support of Sunnis and Christians. Whole districts are essentially run by Hezbollah in the manner of a state. It also conducts various commercial activities, of both a legal and a more criminal nature, including smuggling oil.
So what is Hezbollah? State or non-state? Extremist group or conventional territory-based power? It is instead a strange “hybrid” entity functioning both within and outside state institutions. A state, and yet not a state, capable of cherry-picking responsibilities and activities to the benefit of its own interests, often with dire consequences for the wider country and region. There aren’t too many organizations like Hezbollah, which evolved amid unique regional tensions.
The coming wave, however, could make a range of small, state-like entities a lot more plausible. Contrary to centralization, it might actually spur a kind of “Hezbollahization,” a splintered, tribalized world where everyone has access to the latest technologies, where everyone can support themselves on their own terms, where it is far more possible for anyone to maintain living standards without the great superstructures of nation-state organization.
Consider that a combination of AI, cheap robotics, and advanced biotech coupled with clean energy sources might, for the first time in modernity, make living “off-grid” nearly equivalent to being plugged-in. Recall that over just the last decade the cost of solar photovoltaics has fallen by more than 82 percent and will plunge further, putting energy self-sufficiency for smaller communes within reach. As electrification of infrastructure and alternatives to fossil fuels percolate, more of the world could become self-sufficient—but now equipped with an infrastructure of AI, bio, robotics, and so on, capable of generating information and manufacturing locally.
Fields like education and medicine currently rely on huge social and financial infrastructures. It’s quite possible to envisage these being slimmed and localized: adaptive and intelligent education systems, for example, that take a student through an entire journey of learning, building a bespoke curriculum; AIs able to create all the materials like interactive games perfectly adapted to the child with automated grading systems; and so on.
You might have no collective security umbrella, as in a nation-state system, but hire different forms of physical and cyber protection on an ad hoc basis. AI hackers and autonomous drones will be available to private security groups as well. We saw earlier how offensive capacity is being spread to anyone who wants it; the converse is that the same distribution will, in time, happen to defense. When anyone has access to the bleeding edge, it’s not just nation-states that can mount formidable physical and virtual defenses.
In short, key parts of modern society and social organization that today rely on scale and centralization could be radically devolved by capabilities unlocked with the coming wave. Mass rebellion, secessionism, and state formation of any kind look very different in this world. Redistributing real power means communities of all kinds can live as they wish, whether they are ISIS, FARC, Anonymous, secessionists from Biafra to Catalonia, or a major corporation building luxury theme parks on a remote island in the Pacific.
Some aspects of the coming wave point toward further centralization of power. The biggest AI models will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train, and consequently few will have ownership. But paradoxically a countertrend will play out in parallel. AI breakthroughs already make their way into open-source code repositories within days of being published in open-access journals, making topflight models easy for anyone to access, experiment with, build, and modify in turn. Models down to the weights are published, leaked, and stolen.
Companies like Stability AI and Hugging Face accelerate distributed, decentralized forms of AI. Techniques like CRISPR make biological experimentation easier, meaning biohackers in their garages can tinker at the absolute frontier of science. Ultimately, sharing or copying DNA or the code of a large language model is trivial. Openness is the default, imitations are endemic, cost curves relentlessly go down, and barriers to access crumble. Exponential capabilities are given to anyone who wants them.
This heralds a colossal redistribution of power away from existing centers. Imagine a future where small groups—whether in failing states like Lebanon or in off-grid nomad camps in New Mexico—provide AI-empowered services like credit unions, schools, and health care, services at the heart of the community often reliant on scale or the state. Where the chance to set the terms of society at a micro level becomes irresistible: come to our boutique school and avoid critical race theory forever, or boycott the evil financial system and use our DeFi product. Where any grouping of any kind—ideological, religious, cultural, racial—can self-organize a viable society. Think about setting up your own school. Or hospital or army. It’s such a complex, vast, and difficult project, even the thought of it is tiring. Just gathering the resources, getting necessary permissions and equipment, is a lifelong endeavor. Now consider having an array of assistants who, when asked to create a school, a hospital, or an army, can make it happen in a realistic time frame.
ACI and synthetic biology empower Extinction Rebellion as much as the Dow Jones megacorp; the microstate with a charismatic leader as much as a lumbering giant. While some advantages of size may be augmented, they may also be nullified. Ask yourself what happens to already fraying states if every sect, separatist movement, charitable foundation, and social network, every zealot and xenophobe, every populist conspiracy theory, political party, or even mafia, drug cartel, or terrorist group has their shot at state building. The disenfranchised will simply re-enfranchise themselves—on their own terms.
Fragmentations could occur all over. What if companies themselves start down a journey of becoming states? Or cities decide to break away and gain more autonomy? What if people spend more time, money, and emotional energy in virtual worlds than the real? What happens to traditional hierarchies when tools of awesome power and expertise are as available to street children as to billionaires? It’s already a remarkable fact that corporate titans spend most of their lives working on software, like Gmail or Excel, accessible to most people on the planet. Extend that, radically, with the democratization of empowerment, when everyone on the planet has unfettered access to the most powerful technologies ever built.
As people increasingly take power into their own hands, I expect inequality’s newest frontier to lie in biology. A fragmented world is one where some jurisdictions are far more permissive about human experimentation than others, where pockets of advanced bio-capabilities and self-modification produce divergent outcomes at the level of DNA, which in turn produce divergent outcomes at the levels of states and microstates. There could then be something like a biohacking personal enhancement arms race. A country desperate for investment or advantage might see potential in becoming an anything-goes biohacker paradise. What does the social contract look like if a select group of “post-humans” engineer themselves to some unreachable intellectual or physical plane? How would this intersect with the dynamic of fragmenting politics, some enclaves trying to leave the whole behind?
All of this is still firmly in the realm of speculation. But we are entering a new era where the previously unthinkable is now a distinct possibility. Being blinkered about what’s happening is, in my view, more dangerous than being overly speculative.
Governance works by consent; it is a collective fiction resting on the belief of everyone concerned. In this scenario the sovereign state is pressured to the breaking point. The old social contract gets ripped to pieces. Institutions are bypassed, undermined, superseded. Taxation, law enforcement, compliance with norms: all under threat. In this scenario rapid fragmentation of power could accelerate a kind of “turbo-balkanization” that gives nimble and newly capable actors unprecedented freedom to operate. An unbundling of the great consolidations of authority and service embodied by the state begins.
Something more like the pre-nation-state world emerges in this scenario, neo-medieval, smaller, more local, and constitutionally diverse, a complex, unstable patchwork of polities. Only this time with hugely powerful technology. When northern Italy was a patchwork of small city-states, it gave us the Renaissance, yet was also a field of constant internecine war and feuding. Renaissance is great; unceasing war with tomorrow’s military technology, not so much.
For many people working in or adjacent to technology, these kinds of radical outcomes are not just unwelcome by-products; they’re the goal itself. Hyper-libertarian technologists like the PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel celebrate a vision of the state withering away, seeing this as liberation for an overmighty species of business leaders or “sovereign individuals,” as they call themselves. A bonfire of public services, institutions, and norms is cheered on with an explicit vision where technology might “create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states.”
The techno-libertarian movement takes Ronald Reagan’s 1981 dictum “Government is the problem” to its logical extreme, seeing government’s many flaws but not its immense benefits, believing that its regulatory and tax functions are destructive rate limiters with few upsides—for them at least. I find it deeply depressing that some of the most powerful and privileged take such a narrow and destructive view, but it adds a further impetus to fragmentation.
This is a world where billionaires and latter-day prophets can build and run microstates; where non-state actors from corporations to communes to algorithms begin to overshadow the state from above but also from below. Think again of the stirrup and the profound downstream effects of a single, simple invention. And then think of the scale of invention in the coming wave. Coupled with the existing pressures and fragility, sweeping change on the order of my speculation above doesn’t seem so far-out. What would be stranger is no radical change at all.
If centralization and decentralization sound as if they are in direct contradiction, that’s with good reason: they are. Understanding the future means handling multiple conflicting trajectories at once. The coming wave launches immense centralizing and decentralizing riptides at the same time. Both will be in play at once. Every individual, every business, every church, every nonprofit, every nation, will eventually have its own AI and ultimately its own bio and robotics capability. From a single individual on their sofa to the world’s largest organizations, each AI will aim to achieve the goals of its owner. Herein lies the key to understanding the coming wave of contradictions, a wave full of collisions.
Each new formulation of power will offer a different vision of delivering public goods, or propose a different way to make products or a different set of religious beliefs to evangelize. AI systems already make critical decisions with overt political implications: who receives a loan, a job, a place at college, parole; who gets seen by a senior physician. Within the decade AIs will decide how public money gets spent, where military forces are assigned, or what students should learn. This will occur in both centralizing and decentralizing ways. An AI might, for example, operate as one massive, state-spanning system, a single general-purpose utility governing hundreds of millions. Equally we will also have vastly capable systems, available at low cost, open-source, highly adapted, catering to a village.
Multiple ownership structures will exist in tandem: technology democratized in open-source collectives, the products of today’s corporate leaders or insurgent blitz-scaling start-ups, and government held, whether through nationalization or in-house nurturing. All will coexist and coevolve, and everywhere they will alter, magnify, produce, and disrupt flows and networks of power.
Where and how the forces play out will vary dramatically according to existing social and political factors. This should not be an oversimplified picture, and there will be numerous points of resistance and adaptation not obvious in advance. Some sectors or regions will go one way, some the other, some will see powerful contortions of both. Some hierarchies and social structures will be reinforced, others overturned; some places may become more equal or authoritarian, others much less so. In all cases, the additional stress and volatility, the unpredictable amplification of power, the wrenching disruption of radical new centers of capability, will further stress the foundation of the liberal democratic nation-state system.
And if this picture sounds too strange, paradoxical, and impossible, consider this. The coming wave will only deepen and recapitulate the exact same contradictory dynamics of the last wave. The internet does precisely this: centralizes in a few key hubs while also empowering billions of people. It creates behemoths and yet gives everyone the opportunity to join in. Social media created a few giants and a million tribes. Everyone can build a website, but there’s only one Google. Everyone can sell their own niche products, but there’s only one Amazon. And on and on. The disruption of the internet era is largely explained by this tension, this potent, combustible brew of empowerment and control.
Now, with the coming wave, forces like these will expand beyond the internet and the digital sphere. Apply them to any given area of life. Yes, this recipe for wrenching change is one we’ve seen before. But if the internet seemed big, this is bigger. Massively omni-use general-purpose technologies will change both society and what it means to be human. This might sound hyperbolic. But within the next decade, we must anticipate radical flux, new concentrations and dispersals of information, wealth, and above all power.
So, where does it leave technology and, much more important, where does it leave us? What happens if the state can no longer control, in a balanced fashion, the coming wave? So far in part 3, we’ve discussed the already precarious condition of the modern nation-state and previewed new threats arriving with the coming wave. We’ve seen how a crushing set of stressors and a colossal redistribution of power will converge to take the one force capable of managing the wave—the state—to a point of crisis.
That moment is almost here. Brought about by the inexorable rise of technology and the end of nations, this crisis will take the form of a huge, existential-level bind, a set of brutal choices and trade-offs that represents the most important dilemma of the twenty-first century.
Leaving us with no good options would be technology’s ultimate failure. Yet this is precisely where we are headed.