Well, well... if it isn't a smash-bang-overhyped Foreign Affairs piece??

But it's Niall Ferguson, so I'll at least give it a chance. #1598264

sooo... let's BLACKPILL OURSELVES A LITTLE MORE: #1598672

they have all these nice subtitles: "supremacy by scarcity" or "empires of AI" or "plantation economics of the chatbot age" -- LOL -- "the imperial trilemma" (defend dominions; maintain tech primary, generous welfare)

Progress therefore depends on energy, critical minerals, advanced chips, and capital on a massive scale. The moment a technology’s frontier comes to depend on vast quantities of scarce inputs, its production becomes a matter of geopolitics.

AND:

Control of frontier AI and its rewards are concentrated in a handful of firms in China and the United States.

In the absence of other forces, empires seldom succumb to a challenger or to barbarians at the gates. More often, they fail because defending their vast dominions drains them dry, whether of material resources, the consent of the governed, or the loyalty of elites.

The standard overextension thesis. Failure can be:

• FINANCIAL: British Empire after two world wars and a ginormous/excessive welfare state
• INSTITUTIONAL: Qing empire 1800s, "when it failed to industrialize, reform its bureaucracy, and renew the legitimacy of the Manchu dynasty."
• or TECHNOLOGICAL:

Failure can be financial, as it was for the British Empire after 1945, when the debts of two world wars forced London to liquidate its imperial assets to pay the price of victory: a welfare state for the citizens of the imperial metropole. It can be institutional, as it was for the Qing empire in the late nineteenth century, when it failed to industrialize, reform its bureaucracy, and renew the legitimacy of the Manchu dynasty.
History is filled with empires that fell victim to their own frontier technologies.

The Royal Navy’s Dreadnought of 1906 gave the United Kingdom the first “all big gun” battleship and, with the same stroke, rendered its existing battle fleet obsolete. Overnight, this breakthrough opened the way for rivals such as Germany, erasing a century of accumulated British advantage

"The decisive question in the contest between Beijing and Washington may therefore not be who achieves artificial general intelligence first, but who can bankroll the race."

AI is also by its nature an imperial substance. Whoever produces and controls frontier models acquires global leverage over innovation, production, science, culture, and, ultimately, advanced thought...

Like silver for Habsburg Spain (well, bitter result... #1561324) or oil for America's century

...this new commodity will not merely enrich the powers that dominate it but also provide the basic operating system on which everyone else must depend.

LOTS of these historical analogies:

Like the East India Companies and the Rothschild banks, which were ultimately subordinate to the governments of the metropole, frontier labs have been granted extraordinary latitude in exchange for advancing the metropole’s position.

Everything is happening so much faster today, posit the authors:

The question is whether the new hegemons can convert their particular endowments—the United States’ capital markets, frontier labs, and transistors and China’s state direction, cheap energy, and watts—into durable imperial orders or whether they will run aground trying.

"An empire is more than a great power. It is a polity whose authority and influence extend over vast territories and peoples without their express consent."

AI is an imperial technology > a commercial one:

• the RETURN OF SCARCITY (well, ish #1471628): "An empire is, at its heart, a system for controlling finite strategic resources: able-bodied humans, arable land, grain, metals, and minerals"
• "The same scarcity that makes Taiwan worth fighting over also fuels the race to make it dispensable"

Here's one observation that historians/lay peeps could learn from:

The ascendancy of the British Empire in the nineteenth century was not driven primarily by vast territorial holdings, many of which had little economic value, or from control over factories and intellectual property—which was so poorly protected as to be effectively open source. Instead, British supremacy came from dominating the physical, technological, and financial pipelines through which the world economy flowed: coaling stations, strategic waterways such as the Suez Canal and the Strait of Malacca, undersea telegraph cables, and sterling finance through the City of London

both AI powers converge on the same architecture, mandated by the scaling laws. Below a certain threshold of energy, capital, and compute, a country is not a weaker player; it is not in the game at all.

There is at least one crucial difference between the two AI empires. China’s is a deliberate act of state, whereas the United States’ is not.

In the contest between the AI metropoles, each enjoys a different comparative advantage. The United States has a slim—perhaps six-month—lead in domains such as advanced chatbots and AI software tools, while China has the edge in the embodied ones, which include robotics, autonomous systems, and manufacturing automation.

Empires provide public goods—order, standards, security, a reserve currency, access to technology—in exchange not merely for revenue but for alignment or submission. To allies and partners, Washington tenders the full AI stack: advanced chips, costly frontier models, tooling, and the security relationship that comes with them. In return, it expects those countries to comply with U.S. export controls, restrictions on Chinese hardware and data, and, in some cases, tariffs or outright bans on Chinese technology

vs China:

Beijing is more subtle: its open-weight models can be freely downloaded and modified; adopt them, along with China’s hardware, cloud, and engineers, it tells client states, and the standards will follow. For both metropoles, this is imperial strategy in its purest form, not just a scramble for market share.

"Governments across the globe must pick a side—whose chips, whose clouds, which camp—a binary choice that is increasingly uncomfortable for many."

What China offers is cheap and mostly open; what the United States offers is expensive and mostly closed. An empire assembled from low-cost components and with no barriers to access will likely gain allegiance from the majority of the world’s economies.

BEAUTIFUL observation para:

China has abundant electricity and a near-global monopoly on the rare-earth elements on which the AI stack relies, yet it cannot manufacture leading-edge chips. The United States has the world’s best semiconductors and frontier models, yet it lacks minerals, and its aging energy grid cannot support the insatiable needs of its vast network of new data centers. One empire is short of watts; the other of transistors.

"Capital is the resource most likely to bind both and determine their longevity. An empire is only as durable as its capacity to pay for itself."

Ah, yes.

answer: "By owning the dominant reserve currency, Washington can fund its data center build-out not with its own savings but with everyone else’s."

In the United States, the $2 trillion federal budget deficit reflects a collective unwillingness by the country’s political class to impose the taxes and fiscal restraint needed to cover the mounting costs of Social Security and Medicare.

Yeah, the freakin, filthy boomers. We know #1598011, #1598264

In both countries, falling fertility rates and lengthening lifespans keep worsening the fiscal picture.

...ditto. #1598672

Any empire that spends more servicing its debt than defending itself risks losing its imperial status. The histories of Habsburg Spain, ancien régime France, the Ottomans, Austria-Hungary, and the United Kingdom all illustrate the eighteenth-century political theorist Adam Ferguson’s insight that high debts ultimately induce decline.

Dont' tell them....

"In each case, as a rising proportion of tax revenue was consumed by interest payments, the resources available for imperial defense were limited and then reduced."

For both AI empires, the new technology is touted as a get-out-of-jail-free card—an antidote to mounting debt, demographic decline, and economic stagnation.
**America: ** brittle valuations, wealth effects that propelled growth on the way up destroying growth on the wya down
China: local govt indebtedness and "neijuan" -->—"the grinding, margin-destroying competition that follows. The result would be higher unemployment, especially for the young,"

= pose the age-old imperial dilemma: Butter or guns? Welfare or warfare?

The blackpilled dystopia:

The lesson of past empires is not that either collision or decline is inevitable. It is that the conditions for both—a runaway arms race over a scarce resource, overstretched public financing, mounting domestic backlash, and rent-seeking elites afflicted by strategic myopia—are already present.

but maybe?

Peaceful coexistence was hard enough in the nuclear age—and in the end, one of the superpowers declined and fell. It will be far harder to repeat this benign outcome in a world increasingly run by powerful and relentlessly self-improving machines

I broke the paywall by giving them my contact deets. (Turns out Archive already had it... in an ugly af font/width https://archive.md/QxS5x)