I largely agree with the essay’s argument about wealth inequality. The yard-sale model is a useful reminder that concentration can emerge even without malice, simply from the dynamics of the system itself.
But I sometimes wonder whether wealth inequality is ultimately the most important problem a civilization faces. Wealth attracts attention because it is visible and easy to quantify. Power is harder to measure, but perhaps more consequential.
The deeper question may not be how wealth is distributed, but how power is distributed, how it flows, and what kinds of power structures a society produces. Wealth can limit opportunity, but power shapes the rules under which opportunities exist in the first place.
Which brings me to the idea of a “nation.” If we think of a nation not merely as a geographic territory but as a power institution, its primary function has rarely been innovation. Historically, states evolved to maintain order, coordinate resources, secure borders, and preserve themselves. Innovation was often a byproduct, not the objective.
Looking across the history of civilization, the most transformative innovations rarely emerged from isolated or closed nations. They emerged from flows — of people, ideas, goods, technologies, and cultures across boundaries. The Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the modern internet economy were all products of networks that exceeded any single state.
This is why AI leaves me with a slightly different question. Perhaps the goal is not only to build an innovation nation. Perhaps the larger challenge is to build an innovation civilization — one capable of creating the conditions for human creativity, experimentation, and knowledge exchange at a scale larger than any single nation can sustain on its own.
Thanks for your thoughtful insights as always - I think you’re right that the true aim ought to be a reinvented civilization instead of a nation. And it’s poignant to call out the challenge of creating power structures that can achieve broader human enrichment, and the complication that wealth inequality helps to tilt power towards servicing the few.
I haven’t studied up on power structures to weigh in on the topic, but the point reminds me of a podcast series I’m working through. This is a season dedicated to unveiling the real state of democracy in the US since its founding:
Scene on Radio
The Land that Never Was
*Substack forbids attachments in comments
It’s the story of only one nation, so not enough to discuss on power overall. But it’s been helpful background to the history and cultural foundations that lead to which values and laws get passed in America.
From what I can gather, the USA has always been a nation of oligarchs - our founding fathers were rich slaveowners, all white men, who mainly resisted the British because they wanted to expand their wealth further. It’s kind of painful to listen to but makes a lot of sense - wealth inequality and its ties to power seems to persist through the country’s history, despite our claims to respecting democracy.
It’s painful to live in a reality that fails to fulfill - or blithely violates - your moral conscience. So ever since AI came around, I’ve been wondering if this technological marvel can force us to work towards a more human society.
Since the USA is what I’m most familiar with I wrote the essay with it in mind. I wanted to steer the dominant AI narrative, and for that I assumed I should appeal to the incentives that seem to motivate the dominant influencers in AI.
From what I can tell the US government and AI frontier labs focus a lot on innovation, economic growth, and global AI leadership - especially against China, our main rival in the ‘AI race.’ So I wrote the essay with that angle in mind - here’s how you can get what you want, by doing things that just so happen to serve more of humanity at the same time. Win win.
There’s little chance that anyone in those groups would ever read this essay, but maybe the seeds get planted and the ideas can cross pollinate.
But in reality, we need international cooperation to pursue even the most basic AI safety standards. It is my hope though, that we do end up as a global civilization that creates those conditions you describe.
Thanks for this thoughtful reply. I understand your perspective more than you might expect, because I once thought very much the same way.
For a long time, I believed that if a country could find the right institutions and the right leaders, it could become a good society. I no longer think that is the central question.
The shift did not happen simply because Trump became president again. It happened because I gradually realized that almost anyone who reaches the center of power eventually confronts the same dilemmas and reproduces many of the same patterns. The problem seems deeper than any particular leader, party, or ideology.
What we are facing may be a structural tension between national sovereignty and global governance.
The problems we see today are no longer merely American problems. They are not only Chinese problems, Russian problems, Israeli problems, Iranian problems, or even the problems between Canada and Mexico. They emerge wherever political power is organized around sovereign states operating inside an increasingly interconnected civilization.
I now live in a digital nomad city that does not truly belong to any of the countries above, yet it is affected by the consequences of all of them. Decisions made thousands of miles away ripple through local communities, migration flows, businesses, education, and everyday life. The network has become global, but political authority remains fragmented.
As AI grows more powerful, I find myself becoming less concerned about intelligence itself and more concerned about the institutions that will wield it.
The danger, in my view, is not AI alone. It is the fusion of AI with sovereign power. We may be combining a power structure inherited from the agricultural age with technological capabilities approaching superintelligence.
The optimistic story is that AI could help us build a more human civilization.
The darker possibility is that it could give unprecedented reach, speed, and persistence to institutions that were never designed for a planetary civilization in the first place.
After all, look at SpaceX. It is not only trying to go to Mars; it is also talking about launching AI factories into Earth’s orbit. Our technological ambitions are becoming planetary—and perhaps soon interplanetary—while our dominant political architecture remains the sovereign state.
At that point, the problem is no longer just the elephant in the room.
Its darker side becomes something much larger: not an elephant, but the shadow of an interstellar civilization cast by an agricultural-age power structure.
Perhaps that is why I increasingly find myself asking not how to build an innovation nation, but how humanity might eventually build institutions capable of governing an innovation civilization.
And perhaps the question that worries me most is this:
Will AI help humanity transcend the limits of sovereignty, or will sovereignty become the vessel through which AI amplifies its oldest instincts?
That’s a really smart take - I’ll be reading your next article soon and keeping this in mind. And perhaps there is hope yet - your point about us being locked in an agricultural institutional mindset suggests we have the capability to evolve past them.
I love your writing Muxin. I've been doing deeper dives into Values with my leadership community, and almost without fail, we keep coming back to the fact that they're dead-center at the heart of thoughts, feelings, actions, beliefs, etc.
I largely agree with the essay’s argument about wealth inequality. The yard-sale model is a useful reminder that concentration can emerge even without malice, simply from the dynamics of the system itself.
But I sometimes wonder whether wealth inequality is ultimately the most important problem a civilization faces. Wealth attracts attention because it is visible and easy to quantify. Power is harder to measure, but perhaps more consequential.
The deeper question may not be how wealth is distributed, but how power is distributed, how it flows, and what kinds of power structures a society produces. Wealth can limit opportunity, but power shapes the rules under which opportunities exist in the first place.
Which brings me to the idea of a “nation.” If we think of a nation not merely as a geographic territory but as a power institution, its primary function has rarely been innovation. Historically, states evolved to maintain order, coordinate resources, secure borders, and preserve themselves. Innovation was often a byproduct, not the objective.
Looking across the history of civilization, the most transformative innovations rarely emerged from isolated or closed nations. They emerged from flows — of people, ideas, goods, technologies, and cultures across boundaries. The Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the modern internet economy were all products of networks that exceeded any single state.
This is why AI leaves me with a slightly different question. Perhaps the goal is not only to build an innovation nation. Perhaps the larger challenge is to build an innovation civilization — one capable of creating the conditions for human creativity, experimentation, and knowledge exchange at a scale larger than any single nation can sustain on its own.
Thanks for your thoughtful insights as always - I think you’re right that the true aim ought to be a reinvented civilization instead of a nation. And it’s poignant to call out the challenge of creating power structures that can achieve broader human enrichment, and the complication that wealth inequality helps to tilt power towards servicing the few.
I haven’t studied up on power structures to weigh in on the topic, but the point reminds me of a podcast series I’m working through. This is a season dedicated to unveiling the real state of democracy in the US since its founding:
Scene on Radio
The Land that Never Was
*Substack forbids attachments in comments
It’s the story of only one nation, so not enough to discuss on power overall. But it’s been helpful background to the history and cultural foundations that lead to which values and laws get passed in America.
From what I can gather, the USA has always been a nation of oligarchs - our founding fathers were rich slaveowners, all white men, who mainly resisted the British because they wanted to expand their wealth further. It’s kind of painful to listen to but makes a lot of sense - wealth inequality and its ties to power seems to persist through the country’s history, despite our claims to respecting democracy.
It’s painful to live in a reality that fails to fulfill - or blithely violates - your moral conscience. So ever since AI came around, I’ve been wondering if this technological marvel can force us to work towards a more human society.
Since the USA is what I’m most familiar with I wrote the essay with it in mind. I wanted to steer the dominant AI narrative, and for that I assumed I should appeal to the incentives that seem to motivate the dominant influencers in AI.
From what I can tell the US government and AI frontier labs focus a lot on innovation, economic growth, and global AI leadership - especially against China, our main rival in the ‘AI race.’ So I wrote the essay with that angle in mind - here’s how you can get what you want, by doing things that just so happen to serve more of humanity at the same time. Win win.
There’s little chance that anyone in those groups would ever read this essay, but maybe the seeds get planted and the ideas can cross pollinate.
But in reality, we need international cooperation to pursue even the most basic AI safety standards. It is my hope though, that we do end up as a global civilization that creates those conditions you describe.
Thanks for this thoughtful reply. I understand your perspective more than you might expect, because I once thought very much the same way.
For a long time, I believed that if a country could find the right institutions and the right leaders, it could become a good society. I no longer think that is the central question.
The shift did not happen simply because Trump became president again. It happened because I gradually realized that almost anyone who reaches the center of power eventually confronts the same dilemmas and reproduces many of the same patterns. The problem seems deeper than any particular leader, party, or ideology.
What we are facing may be a structural tension between national sovereignty and global governance.
The problems we see today are no longer merely American problems. They are not only Chinese problems, Russian problems, Israeli problems, Iranian problems, or even the problems between Canada and Mexico. They emerge wherever political power is organized around sovereign states operating inside an increasingly interconnected civilization.
I now live in a digital nomad city that does not truly belong to any of the countries above, yet it is affected by the consequences of all of them. Decisions made thousands of miles away ripple through local communities, migration flows, businesses, education, and everyday life. The network has become global, but political authority remains fragmented.
As AI grows more powerful, I find myself becoming less concerned about intelligence itself and more concerned about the institutions that will wield it.
The danger, in my view, is not AI alone. It is the fusion of AI with sovereign power. We may be combining a power structure inherited from the agricultural age with technological capabilities approaching superintelligence.
The optimistic story is that AI could help us build a more human civilization.
The darker possibility is that it could give unprecedented reach, speed, and persistence to institutions that were never designed for a planetary civilization in the first place.
After all, look at SpaceX. It is not only trying to go to Mars; it is also talking about launching AI factories into Earth’s orbit. Our technological ambitions are becoming planetary—and perhaps soon interplanetary—while our dominant political architecture remains the sovereign state.
At that point, the problem is no longer just the elephant in the room.
Its darker side becomes something much larger: not an elephant, but the shadow of an interstellar civilization cast by an agricultural-age power structure.
Perhaps that is why I increasingly find myself asking not how to build an innovation nation, but how humanity might eventually build institutions capable of governing an innovation civilization.
And perhaps the question that worries me most is this:
Will AI help humanity transcend the limits of sovereignty, or will sovereignty become the vessel through which AI amplifies its oldest instincts?
That’s a really smart take - I’ll be reading your next article soon and keeping this in mind. And perhaps there is hope yet - your point about us being locked in an agricultural institutional mindset suggests we have the capability to evolve past them.
I love your writing Muxin. I've been doing deeper dives into Values with my leadership community, and almost without fail, we keep coming back to the fact that they're dead-center at the heart of thoughts, feelings, actions, beliefs, etc.
Thanks Brandon :D That makes a lot of sense - once you peel back those layers so much of what we believe and do gets driven by our values.
There's a HBS study that our beliefs about why people are poor strongly determines what social policies we create in the US vs European countries: https://www.hbs.edu/ris/download.aspx?name=Inequality+and+happiness+Are+Europeans+and+Americans+different.pdf