IV. International Consequences of AGI

In this essay

The geopolitical order of the twenty-first century will be shaped by which nations master artificial general intelligence and which are mastered by it. The historical analogies—from the British Empire’s command of steam and telegraph to America’s nuclear monopoly—suggest that AGI will be the most consequential power multiplier since the atomic bomb.

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. —Thucydides, *History of the Peloponnesian War*

Technology and Hegemony

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Every era of great-power competition has been shaped by a dominant general-purpose technology. Britain’s nineteenth-century hegemony rested not on any single invention but on the synergistic combination of steam power, iron production, and the electric telegraph.1 The United States achieved its post-1945 dominance through nuclear weapons, aerospace, and semiconductor manufacturing.

The US-China AI Race

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The Rest of the World

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Governance and the International Order

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  1. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (1981), remains the essential work on how technological superiority enabled colonial expansion. ↩︎

  2. For the implications of AI development for middle-income countries, see Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (2018), particularly his analysis of the “AI divide” between nations with and without large-scale data and compute resources. ↩︎

  3. The challenges of governing transformative technologies in a multipolar world are explored in Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, The Age of AI: And Our Human Future (2021). ↩︎