The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

War, peace, commerce, political order, culture—these have always been fundamentally interlinked, and interlinked moreover with technology. Technologies are ideas, manifested in products and services that have profound and lasting consequences for people, social structures, the environment, and everything in between. Modern technology and the state evolved symbiotically, in constant dialogue. Think of how technology facilitated the state’s core working parts, helping construct the edifice of national identity and administration. Writing was invented as an administrative and accounting tool to keep track of debts, inheritances, laws, taxes, contracts, and records of ownership. The clock produced set times, first in limited spaces like monasteries but then in mechanical form across late medieval mercantile cities and eventually across nations, creating common, and ever larger, social units. The printing press helped standardize national languages from a chaos of dialects and thus helped produce a national “imagined community,” the unitary people behind a nation-state. Supplanting more fluid oral traditions, the printed word fixed geography, knowledge, and history in place, promulgating set legal codes and ideologies. Radio and TV turbocharged this process, creating moments of national and even international commonality experienced simultaneously, like FDR’s fireside chats or the World Cup. Weapons, too, are technologies central to the power wielded by nation-states. Indeed, t...

Cannons to Code: How Technology Rewrites the State