The Future of Nations (Ch11)

View Other Book Summaries on AI    Download Book
<<< Previous Chapter    Next Chapter >>>

In medieval Europe, a small triangle of metal helped reshape civilization.

That triangle was the stirrup. Before it, cavalry charges were limited; after it, a mounted knight became a devastating force. The stirrup didn’t just change warfare — it triggered feudalism, a new social order built to sustain and organize that new form of power . Land was expropriated, elites were empowered, obligations were formalized. A minor technical tweak helped birth an entire political system.

Chapter 11 uses this story as its central metaphor. The coming wave of AI, biotechnology, robotics, and quantum computing may feel incremental — just another tech cycle. But like the stirrup, small technical advances can tip the balance of power and quietly reorder society. And when the cost of power plummets, the political consequences are tectonic .

The chapter’s core thesis is that we are entering a period of simultaneous concentration and fragmentation of power. These forces are contradictory — and that’s precisely the point. The future of nations will not move neatly in one direction. It will lurch between centralization and decentralization, often at the same time.

On one side lies concentration.

The author points to the British East India Company — a private corporation that effectively ruled large parts of India, commanded armies, and shaped global politics . It wasn’t a state, but it functioned like one. Today’s megacorporations may not carry muskets, but their reach is profound. Companies like Apple and Google already sit at the center of daily life, controlling ecosystems of services that blur the line between market and governance .

The coming wave could supercharge this trend. AI doesn’t just replace individuals; it augments organizations — which are themselves forms of collective intelligence . Firms with the best models, the most data, and the largest compute clusters may enjoy compounding returns. Intelligence gaps could widen into unbridgeable chasms. The result? Private entities with scale, wealth, and influence rivaling — or even surpassing — many states.

This is not just about profits. It’s about who governs. If companies provide dispute resolution, digital currencies, education platforms, cloud infrastructure, and even defense tools, what remains uniquely “state-like”?

But the story doesn’t end there.

At the same time, the same technologies empower fragmentation.

Hezbollah in Lebanon is offered as an example of a hybrid entity — part militia, part political party, part service provider — operating as a state within a state . The coming wave could make such hybrids more common. Cheap solar energy, AI tutors, autonomous manufacturing, and bioengineering tools could allow communities to operate semi-independently. The infrastructure of scale — once the defining advantage of nation-states — could be radically devolved.

Open-source AI models, CRISPR gene editing, and plummeting costs of robotics suggest a world where small groups, ideological enclaves, corporations, or even wealthy individuals can build micro-polities . The author calls this “turbo-balkanization” — a neo-medieval patchwork of overlapping authorities and loyalties . Renaissance creativity and incessant conflict, powered by technologies far more potent than lances.

Layered on top is the specter of enhanced surveillance. Authoritarian states, particularly China, are already weaving vast systems of facial recognition, data integration, and predictive monitoring . The coming wave could act as rocket fuel for centralized control, making societies fully “legible” to power in ways that twentieth-century dictators could only dream of .

So here lies the chapter’s central dilemma: the same technologies that enable decentralized empowerment also enable unprecedented centralization. Every individual, corporation, and state will wield AI to pursue its own goals . Collisions are inevitable.

This matters today because governance rests on consent — on a shared belief in the legitimacy of institutions . If power fragments into microstates and mega-corporations, or concentrates into techno-authoritarian regimes, the liberal democratic nation-state faces strain from both above and below.

The internet already hinted at this paradox: everyone can publish, but only a few platforms dominate. The coming wave extends that dynamic beyond information into biology, manufacturing, defense, and governance itself .

The stirrup didn’t abolish kingdoms overnight. It set forces in motion that restructured society over centuries. The technologies now emerging are far more transformative — and they’re arriving in decades, not centuries.

The unsettling possibility is not that nothing changes. It’s that everything does, in contradictory ways, all at once. And if the state — the institution meant to balance power — cannot adapt to both concentration and fragmentation, the grand bargain underpinning modern political life may not survive intact.

The future of nations, then, is not a straight line. It’s a collision.

From Chapter 11 of the book: 'The Coming Wave' by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar