Why Artificial Intelligence Matters More Than the Rise and Fall of Great Powers
By Matthew Parish
Tuesday 20 October 2026
The world is obsessed with geopolitics. Every morning we awaken to another declaration from Washington, another warning from Beijing, another Russian military offensive, another Middle Eastern confrontation and another gathering of international leaders solemnly announcing that the international order is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Political commentators debate the decline of American hegemony, the rise of China, the emergence of a multipolar international system and the consequences of an increasingly isolationist United States. All these matters are undoubtedly important. Yet there is a strong argument that they are becoming historical distractions from something vastly more consequential: the development of artificial intelligence, which may transform the material, intellectual and institutional foundations of human civilisation more profoundly than any contemporary redistribution of geopolitical power.
The distinction is one of historical perspective. Geopolitical developments principally concern the distribution of power between states. Artificial intelligence concerns the expansion of the capabilities available to humanity itself. The first determines who exercises authority over the world as it presently exists. The second may determine what kind of world becomes possible in the first place. If artificial intelligence fulfils even a substantial proportion of its apparent potential, the arguments over whether Washington or Beijing dominates the international system may eventually appear rather provincial, much as nineteenth-century diplomatic disputes over the balance of power in Europe now seem less significant than the Industrial Revolution that was transforming the foundations of the societies those diplomats purported to govern.
Consider the historical comparison. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 was regarded by its participants as an event of immense international significance. The European powers attempted to reconstruct the political order following the Napoleonic Wars, establishing arrangements intended to preserve stability and prevent the emergence of another revolutionary military hegemon. Their deliberations influenced European affairs for decades, yet their significance pales beside the concurrent transformation of manufacturing, transport and communications that eventually became known as the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines, mechanised textile production, railways and the subsequent electrification of economic life changed not merely the balance between states but the conditions under which human beings worked, travelled, communicated and lived.
The diplomats of Vienna were rearranging political sovereignty across territories whose populations were about to experience an unprecedented transformation in productive capacity. Their decisions mattered enormously to those who lived through them, particularly those subjected to repression or war, but their power to determine the shape of subsequent centuries was limited by technological developments that few of them properly understood. The political geography of Europe changed repeatedly, whereas industrialisation became a permanent feature of human civilisation. Indeed industrialisation ultimately transformed the nature of political power itself, making possible both the extraordinary prosperity and the catastrophic warfare of the twentieth century.
We may be witnessing something comparable today, although the transformation now underway may prove considerably more radical. The first Industrial Revolution mechanised physical labour. The second transformed energy production and industrial organisation. The information revolution made the storage, transmission and retrieval of knowledge progressively cheaper. Artificial intelligence introduces something different: the possibility of mechanising substantial components of intellectual labour itself. Reasoning, translation, mathematical analysis, computer programming, scientific modelling, administrative processing and the interpretation of complex bodies of information are increasingly susceptible to assistance by computational systems capable of performing tasks that previously required highly trained human specialists.
This is not to suggest that artificial intelligence possesses human consciousness, personal judgment or moral responsibility. These remain distinct philosophical questions, and the ability to perform intellectual tasks does not necessarily establish the existence of subjective experience. The economically revolutionary characteristic of artificial intelligence is more immediate: activities that historically required scarce human expertise can increasingly be performed, assisted or reproduced using computational resources. The resulting transformation in the economics of knowledge may prove as profound as the transformation in the economics of physical labour that followed the invention of industrial machinery.
Knowledge has always been one of humanity’s most unequally distributed resources. Wealthy societies possess universities, research institutions, hospitals, legal professions, financial experts and elaborate administrative bureaucracies. Poor societies frequently struggle to provide even elementary versions of these institutions, not necessarily because their populations lack intelligence or ambition but because the accumulation and transmission of expertise are extraordinarily expensive. Training a doctor takes years. Developing competent public administration can take generations. Establishing advanced scientific research institutions requires sustained financial investment and the creation of complex professional communities.
Artificial intelligence has the potential to alter this equation. A sophisticated computational system capable of explaining technical material, translating between languages, analysing medical evidence, assisting agricultural planning or providing educational instruction can make certain forms of expertise available at a marginal cost far below that of traditional professional services. It cannot replace all human expertise, particularly where physical intervention, accountability or contextual judgement are necessary. Nevertheless it can reduce one of the principal structural disadvantages confronting developing societies: the scarcity of accessible knowledge.
This is why the significance of artificial intelligence for global development may ultimately exceed its significance for the already wealthy economies of Europe, North America and East Asia. A London lawyer using artificial intelligence to draft a commercial agreement more efficiently enjoys a productivity improvement. A small entrepreneur in rural Africa using the same technology to understand international contractual obligations may gain access to an economic opportunity that was previously unavailable altogether. The distinction is between doing something more cheaply and being able to do something for the first time.
Similar possibilities arise throughout the developing world. A teacher in a remote village may acquire access to an interactive educational resource capable of explaining mathematics, science and languages at different levels of complexity. A medical professional working in an under-resourced clinic may obtain computational assistance in evaluating symptoms and identifying conditions requiring specialist treatment. A farmer may use locally adapted systems to interpret weather patterns, crop diseases and agricultural market information. A small manufacturer may acquire assistance with engineering problems, international marketing or regulatory compliance that would otherwise require consultants far beyond the enterprise’s financial means.
These examples should not be mistaken for guarantees of successful deployment. Medical systems require rigorous evaluation, educational applications must be adapted to local circumstances and agricultural advice depends upon accurate information about particular environments. Nevertheless the opportunities are sufficiently substantial that the World Bank’s Digital Progress and Trends Report 2025 expressly identifies artificial intelligence as a potential means of accelerating economic development, particularly through comparatively inexpensive applications capable of operating on ordinary mobile devices. The World Bank emphasises that such applications may be especially valuable where sophisticated computing infrastructure remains limited, provided that countries also improve connectivity, computing access, locally relevant data and digital competence.
The crucial development is that sophisticated intellectual resources may no longer need to be physically concentrated in the great metropolitan centres of the wealthy world. Historically the accumulation of intellectual capital has followed the accumulation of financial capital, creating a reinforcing cycle in which prosperous societies become more knowledgeable and knowledgeable societies become more prosperous. Artificial intelligence offers the possibility of weakening this relationship. A developing country may not need to reproduce every stage of the institutional evolution experienced by the developed world before acquiring access to sophisticated forms of technical and professional assistance.
This phenomenon is sometimes described as technological leapfrogging. Countries without extensive landline telephone networks adopted mobile communications without first constructing the infrastructure that had characterised Western telecommunications. Some developing economies expanded access to electronic payments without reproducing the elaborate branch banking systems of Europe and North America. Artificial intelligence could permit a similar leap in the provision of knowledge-intensive services, allowing societies to acquire capabilities that traditionally required decades of investment in professional education and institutional development.
The implications for global productivity could be extraordinary. Economic development ultimately depends upon improvements in the quantity and quality of goods and services that societies can produce using available resources. Natural resources alone do not explain prosperity, as the economic histories of resource-rich but institutionally impoverished countries demonstrate. Nor does population size. Productivity depends heavily upon technological sophistication, institutional competence, education and the organisation of economic activity. Artificial intelligence has the potential to improve several of these factors simultaneously.
Unlike a conventional industrial machine, which is generally designed to perform a particular category of physical task, artificial intelligence is a general-purpose technology capable of adaptation across an extraordinarily wide range of intellectual activities. The same underlying advances may improve software development, scientific research, logistics, engineering design, legal administration and education. Improvements in one area may consequently generate improvements elsewhere, creating potentially cumulative increases in productive efficiency. If these effects become sufficiently widespread, the result could be a significant acceleration in the rate at which the world economy generates material prosperity.
There is already evidence of substantial adoption, although the ultimate economic consequences remain uncertain. Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index Report records the use of artificial intelligence in at least one business function by 88 per cent of the organisations covered by its adoption survey, while observing that the deployment of more autonomous artificial intelligence agents remains at an early stage. Such figures do not demonstrate that the promised productivity revolution has already occurred. They do suggest, however, that artificial intelligence is moving beyond an experimental technology confined to research laboratories and becoming part of the ordinary infrastructure of economic activity.
This is an important distinction when assessing the geopolitical significance of the United States and China. The recurrent American tendency towards military intervention, followed by periods of relative isolationism, has characterised international affairs for generations. American foreign policy has repeatedly oscillated between an expansive conception of international responsibilities and a domestic political preference for avoiding costly overseas commitments. China, meanwhile, has undergone an extraordinary economic transformation and now possesses the industrial, technological and military capabilities to challenge aspects of American predominance.
Yet neither phenomenon necessarily changes the fundamental productive possibilities available to humanity. If China becomes the world’s largest economy, the international distribution of wealth and influence will change. If the United States withdraws from particular international commitments, regional balances of power will be disturbed. If a new geopolitical confrontation divides the world into rival economic blocs, international trade and investment may become more expensive and less efficient. These developments can have serious and sometimes devastating consequences, but they are primarily changes in the organisation and distribution of existing economic and political power.
Artificial intelligence offers something categorically different. It may increase the total quantity of economic opportunity available to human societies, rather than merely redistribute existing opportunities between competing states. The distinction resembles the difference between arguing over who owns an agricultural estate and discovering a new method of cultivation that multiplies its productive capacity. Ownership remains important, particularly for determining who benefits from the resulting prosperity. Nevertheless the technological transformation affects the underlying possibilities in a manner that changes the substance of the argument itself.
Indeed it is conceivable that artificial intelligence will eventually alter the significance of national economic size. China presently possesses important advantages arising from its enormous manufacturing capacity, extensive industrial supply chains and substantial population. The United States enjoys advantages associated with its capital markets, technological companies, research institutions and international financial position. Yet if sophisticated computational systems progressively reduce the human labour required for intellectual production, the relationship between population, territory and national productive capacity may become considerably less predictable.
The geopolitical consequences could be especially disruptive for countries whose economic development strategies depend upon the international competitiveness of relatively inexpensive labour. For several decades the integration of developing economies into global supply chains has relied partly upon wage differentials between wealthy and poorer countries. Artificial intelligence may reduce the value of some categories of outsourced intellectual labour, including routine software development, customer support, accounting and administrative processing. At the same time it may enable firms in poorer countries to compete in markets from which they were previously excluded. The result will not necessarily favour either rich or poor societies uniformly; it will depend upon how rapidly institutions and labour markets adapt.
This raises an uncomfortable issue for those who regard artificial intelligence as an unqualified instrument of global emancipation. Technological revolutions have never distributed their benefits automatically. Industrialisation generated extraordinary increases in aggregate prosperity while also producing dangerous working conditions, exploitative labour relationships, urban deprivation and profound social conflict. The contemporary artificial intelligence revolution may create similar tensions, particularly if the returns on computational capital accrue disproportionately to a relatively small number of technology companies and their investors.
The International Monetary Fund has estimated that approximately 40 per cent of global employment is exposed to artificial intelligence, with substantially higher exposure in advanced economies. Exposure does not mean inevitable unemployment: many tasks may be improved rather than eliminated. Nevertheless the distributional consequences could be considerable, especially where employees lack the opportunity to retrain or where increased productivity translates principally into higher corporate profits rather than improved wages.
There is also a danger that artificial intelligence could reinforce the existing inequalities of the international economic system. The World Bank has found that high-income countries possess a dominant share of global data-centre capacity, while reliable internet access and digital skills remain deeply unequal. A technology capable of democratising expertise will do little for communities without electricity, affordable communications infrastructure or the educational foundations necessary to evaluate its outputs. Without deliberate public investment, the artificial intelligence revolution could produce a world in which already wealthy societies become dramatically more productive while poorer countries fall further behind.
This is why the most important international development policies of the coming decades may have little resemblance to the traditional preoccupations of geopolitics. Instead of concentrating upon diplomatic alignments, military assistance programmes and arguments over international institutional representation, development policy may increasingly need to focus upon electricity generation, affordable internet access, digital education, computational infrastructure and the creation of locally adapted artificial intelligence systems. These are not glamorous matters, and they rarely attract the attention devoted to international summits. Nevertheless they may ultimately determine whether hundreds of millions of people acquire meaningful access to the productivity improvements associated with artificial intelligence.
The question of language is particularly important. Much of the world’s sophisticated intellectual and scientific information has historically been concentrated in a relatively small number of international languages, principally English. This creates disadvantages for populations whose educational systems and professional cultures operate in other languages. Artificial intelligence systems capable of reliable translation and multilingual explanation may substantially reduce these barriers. A technically gifted student in a country with limited access to English-language educational institutions could potentially engage with scientific material that was once practically inaccessible.
The implications extend beyond economic development into the distribution of cultural influence. The predominance of English in international commerce, science and academic life has partly reflected the political and economic dominance of the English-speaking world. If translation becomes sufficiently accurate, inexpensive and instantaneous, language may cease to function as quite such a substantial barrier to international intellectual participation. Cultural traditions previously disadvantaged by limited global accessibility may enjoy new opportunities for expression, while smaller languages may find themselves better equipped to participate in scientific and commercial exchange.
Artificial intelligence may also transform the process of scientific discovery itself. Historically the progress of science has depended upon the limited intellectual capacities of human researchers, constrained by the time required to formulate hypotheses, analyse evidence and conduct experiments. Computational systems can assist with the identification of patterns in enormous datasets, the modelling of molecular structures and the exploration of scientific possibilities that would otherwise require substantial human effort. The potential consequences for medicine, materials science, agriculture and energy production are correspondingly significant.
Stanford’s 2026 AI Index identifies increasingly substantial applications in molecular biology, chemistry and medical research, while also documenting persistent limitations and the need for experimental validation. This qualification is essential. Artificial intelligence does not transform a computational prediction into a verified scientific discovery merely by generating it. Nevertheless systems that help scientists identify promising avenues of investigation can reduce the costs of research and potentially accelerate the development of new treatments, materials and industrial processes.
The implications for global health may be particularly important. Many preventable deaths occur not because medical science lacks effective treatments but because healthcare systems cannot deliver those treatments consistently and affordably. Artificial intelligence cannot manufacture medicines, construct hospitals or replace trained medical personnel where physical intervention is required. Yet it may improve the interpretation of diagnostic information, assist the organisation of scarce medical resources, accelerate medical research and provide decision-support tools to professionals working in difficult circumstances. Even modest improvements in these areas, distributed across large populations, could have consequences for human welfare far exceeding those associated with many highly publicised diplomatic developments.
Nor is the potential limited to the private economy. Effective government depends upon the collection, interpretation and application of information, and these activities are frequently expensive, inefficient and vulnerable to bureaucratic failure. Artificial intelligence could assist tax administration, the detection of procurement irregularities, the management of public infrastructure, the interpretation of legislation and the provision of administrative services. Developing countries with limited administrative capacity might thereby acquire some of the institutional advantages historically associated with much wealthier states.
Of course there is a darker alternative. The same technologies could facilitate intrusive surveillance, automated censorship, political manipulation and the more efficient administration of authoritarian repression. Artificial intelligence is not inherently democratic, any more than industrial machinery was inherently liberal. Its political consequences will depend upon the legal, institutional and cultural arrangements within which it operates. A technologically sophisticated dictatorship may become a more effective dictatorship, just as a technologically sophisticated democracy may become a more efficient and prosperous democracy.
This consideration complicates the proposition that artificial intelligence is more important than geopolitics, because the two phenomena are not independent. The international struggle over advanced semiconductors, computing infrastructure, critical minerals, communications networks and technological standards demonstrates that artificial intelligence is already becoming an object of geopolitical competition. American and Chinese technological rivalry may shape who controls the most powerful systems, which societies obtain access to them and the conditions under which they may be used. Political power therefore retains considerable influence over the distribution of technological benefits.
The point is not that geopolitics has ceased to matter. Rather, it is that geopolitics may increasingly become subordinate to the underlying technological transformation. The competition between the United States and China may matter most not because one country eventually becomes more powerful than the other but because their rivalry determines whether advanced artificial intelligence becomes a broadly accessible international resource or a collection of incompatible technological monopolies. In the latter case, geopolitical competition could substantially diminish the developmental benefits that artificial intelligence might otherwise provide.
There is also the uncomfortable relationship between artificial intelligence and military power. Advanced computational systems may improve intelligence analysis, logistical planning, autonomous weapons, cyber operations and military decision-making. They may lower the costs of certain forms of warfare while increasing the destructive potential of others. In this respect the development of artificial intelligence could make geopolitical confrontation more dangerous rather than less significant. The history of technological progress offers no reassurance that more sophisticated civilisations necessarily become more peaceful.
Living in Ukraine provides an unusually direct perspective upon this dilemma. Russian aggression has demonstrated that the nineteenth-century instruments of territorial conquest remain entirely capable of producing twenty-first-century devastation. For those whose homes have been destroyed or whose relatives have been killed, abstract arguments about long-term technological development offer little immediate consolation. Whether a country survives an invasion is not a secondary matter, and political independence remains a necessary condition for societies to make their own choices about technological and economic development.
Nevertheless Ukraine also illustrates the relationship between technological innovation and national resilience. The wartime application of increasingly sophisticated computational technologies to communications, intelligence, engineering and unmanned systems demonstrates how technological capabilities can alter the practical relationship between military resources and national power. More importantly, Ukraine’s eventual reconstruction will depend heavily upon improving administrative efficiency, rebuilding infrastructure, modernising industry and developing human capital. Artificial intelligence may make substantial contributions to each of these objectives, even though it cannot substitute for security, competent government or international investment.
There is another reason why technological development deserves greater historical attention than the recurrent crises of international politics: its effects are frequently cumulative and difficult to reverse. A diplomatic alliance may collapse. A president may leave office. An empire may fragment. A country’s relative economic importance may diminish. Yet once a scientifically useful discovery has entered the stock of human knowledge, subsequent generations can normally build upon it, even if political disruptions temporarily obstruct its application.
The history of antibiotics provides an instructive example. The international political arrangements of the 1930s have largely disappeared, but the medical transformation made possible by antibiotics continues to shape human life. The states that first developed particular technologies may decline in relative power while those technologies become universal features of civilisation. In this sense the achievements of science and technology often possess a historical durability that the arrangements of diplomacy cannot match.
Artificial intelligence could prove particularly consequential because it may accelerate the process through which new knowledge is generated. Previous technological revolutions improved humanity’s ability to manipulate the physical world. Artificial intelligence may increasingly improve humanity’s ability to discover new methods of manipulating that world. If this process becomes self-reinforcing, even within particular scientific or technical fields, its consequences could be enormous. It would be premature to assume that artificial intelligence will necessarily generate autonomous scientific progress or an inevitable technological singularity. But the prospect of materially accelerating research across numerous disciplines is sufficiently credible to command serious attention.
There is also a philosophical dimension to this transformation. Human civilisation has always been organised around assumptions about the scarcity of intelligence, expertise and judgement. Educational institutions exist to cultivate these attributes. Professional qualifications certify their possession. Corporations and governments establish hierarchies partly to coordinate their application. Economic inequality often reflects differences in access to specialised knowledge, while political authority frequently depends upon claims to superior understanding of complex circumstances.
Artificial intelligence does not abolish these structures, but it challenges their underlying assumptions. If substantial categories of intellectual work become widely reproducible at low cost, societies may need to reconsider the relationship between education and employment, expertise and authority, knowledge and economic reward. The value of being able to recall information may decline relative to the value of interpreting it critically. The importance of performing routine analysis may diminish while the importance of identifying appropriate objectives and exercising responsible judgement increases. Institutions that fail to accommodate these changes could become increasingly detached from the practical organisation of economic and intellectual life.
This transformation may be particularly unsettling for the established elites of wealthy societies. Professional status has historically rested upon access to expertise that was expensive to acquire and difficult for outsiders to reproduce. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers, academics and senior administrators have consequently enjoyed varying degrees of economic and institutional privilege. Artificial intelligence may make some aspects of their specialised knowledge more widely accessible, creating pressures to justify professional authority through qualities other than possession of information alone.
These changes will not eliminate the need for professionals, and in many fields they may increase the value of genuinely sophisticated expertise. Nevertheless they may disturb established hierarchies in ways that conventional geopolitical developments rarely do. A change in the balance of power between Washington and Beijing does not necessarily affect the day-to-day organisation of a professional institution in London, Paris or Berlin. A sufficiently capable artificial intelligence system may challenge that institution’s established working practices, economic model and conception of professional competence almost overnight.
The environmental implications also demand attention. Artificial intelligence requires substantial quantities of electricity, computing equipment, water and other resources, and its expansion may create new pressures upon energy infrastructure. The International Energy Agency’s updated projections envisage global data-centre electricity consumption approximately doubling between 2025 and 2030. This is a reminder that the digital economy remains dependent upon the physical world and that advanced computational capabilities cannot be sustained without investment in energy systems.
Yet artificial intelligence may also improve the design and operation of those systems, including electricity-grid management, industrial efficiency and the discovery of new materials. Whether the environmental benefits outweigh the costs will depend upon technological innovation, energy policy and the incentives governing deployment. Again the central question is not which great power enjoys temporary geopolitical predominance but whether humanity can organise the application of an extraordinary new technological capacity in a manner that produces sustainable and broadly distributed prosperity.
There is a danger of exaggerating the inevitability of all this. Artificial intelligence may encounter technical limitations that prove more persistent than current enthusiasts anticipate. Its economic benefits may be concentrated in particular industries. Some applications may prove unreliable, socially harmful or more expensive than their advocates suggest. Governments may regulate its development restrictively, while consumers and professional institutions may resist rapid adoption. The extraordinary capital expenditure associated with advanced computing infrastructure may also produce financial instability if expected revenues fail to materialise.
These uncertainties matter, but they do not undermine the central argument. The historical importance of a technological development does not depend upon its fulfilling every extravagant prediction made on its behalf. The railway did not abolish distance. The internet did not abolish ignorance. The invention of antibiotics did not eliminate infectious disease. Nevertheless each transformed the conditions of human existence in ways that proved more durable and pervasive than most of the political controversies contemporary with its development.
The same may be true of artificial intelligence. Even if its capabilities improve more slowly than enthusiasts expect, the possibility of making sophisticated intellectual assistance substantially cheaper and more widely accessible represents a transformation of considerable historical importance. If its applications continue to spread through scientific research, education, industry and public administration, the cumulative consequences could reshape the global development process over several generations.
The United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report 2025 appropriately emphasises that the significance of artificial intelligence cannot be measured solely by technological performance. Human development concerns the expansion of the choices available to individuals and communities, including their opportunities to live healthy, educated, prosperous and meaningful lives. Artificial intelligence matters because it may expand those choices, although whether it actually does so will depend upon decisions made by governments, businesses and citizens.
This provides the proper perspective from which to assess the relative importance of geopolitics and technological progress. Geopolitical power is an instrument through which states attempt to advance their interests. Human development is a more fundamental objective, because it concerns the conditions of life that political institutions are ultimately supposed to serve. A country may become more powerful internationally without making its citizens happier, healthier or more prosperous. Conversely technological improvements may substantially enhance human welfare without producing dramatic alterations in the international balance of power.
It is therefore possible that contemporary political commentary has mistaken the most visible developments for the most consequential. The speeches of presidents, movements of armies and declarations of international summits attract attention because they are dramatic, immediate and easily incorporated into narratives of conflict. Technological progress is often less theatrical. It takes place in research laboratories, computer systems, universities, factories and the ordinary working practices of millions of people. Its consequences accumulate gradually until societies discover that the foundations of their economic and intellectual existence have changed.
A historian writing in the year 2100 may therefore regard the geopolitical preoccupations of the 2020s rather differently from their contemporary observers. The oscillations of American foreign policy, the competition between Washington and Beijing and the struggles of regional powers may occupy important chapters in the political history of our era. But the development of increasingly capable artificial intelligence may be understood as the event that fundamentally transformed the possibilities of global human development.
That conclusion is not inevitable. Catastrophic war, authoritarian control of technology, institutional failure or extreme concentrations of economic power could prevent artificial intelligence from fulfilling much of its developmental potential. Indeed the most consequential political decisions of our era may be those that determine whether the technology remains accessible, competitive, accountable and directed towards improving human welfare. In that sense geopolitics still matters enormously, but increasingly because of its capacity either to facilitate or obstruct a technological transformation of much greater potential significance.
The ultimate question confronting humanity is not simply whether the United States remains the world’s predominant power, whether China supersedes it or whether international relations descend into another period of antagonistic blocs. It is whether the extraordinary intellectual resources being created through artificial intelligence can be used to reduce poverty, improve healthcare, expand educational opportunity, accelerate scientific discovery and make competent institutions more widely available. These objectives are not merely another set of geopolitical preferences. They concern the future capacities of human civilisation itself.
The great powers will continue to compete, presidents will continue to make grandiose declarations and armies will continue to march. The international order will doubtless undergo further transformations, as it always has. Yet beneath these familiar dramas something much more fundamental may be occurring: humanity is developing tools that could radically alter the relationship between knowledge, labour, wealth and opportunity. The politicians are arguing over who will govern the world. Artificial intelligence may determine what the world they seek to govern will actually become.
And that, in the longer perspective of history, may prove infinitely more important.
