Since AI models and agents scale better (in theory) than human teams the most motivated and productive among us will increasingly lean on them as part of their work. If in the future governments play their same traditional role then they'll necessarily rely on AI surrogates and proxies: digital diplomats.
Then it becomes a race to see who can digitize their culture and ideologies faster and deploy globally. We're seeing the early stages of this play out in chip manufacturing as well as data center deployment and open-weight LLMs. Expect this to accelerate.
I think this is why we're seeing the big tech companies in the largest economies who have large network effects and are known to have extensive ties to their governments aggressively pursuing an "AI at all costs" strategy.
So what comes next? We'll continue to see dominance by the countries with the best telecommunications/electrical/chip manufacturing infrastructure of course, and we can probably expect further erosion of social media networks since they're the "digital frontline" so-to-speak. But what else?