VOLUME V, CHAPTER 14, SECTION 1
The Present International Order, from Old Rules to a Wholly New Output
Part Five walked the space between nations, the taking, the treaty, the taken's responses. This part is the last, a single chapter, and this section does the first of its two jobs. It closes the account of the present international order, showing that however fine its rules, the core is still the fixing in place of a balance of power. And from that closing it draws out one thing that changes the whole board, a wholly new output now redrawing the map, which the rest of the chapter, and the volume, will follow to its edge. Artificial intelligence.
Start by closing the international order, briefly, since the last chapter set the frame. The present order between nations rests on a body of rules built after the great wars of the last century, rules for money, for trade, for the dealings of nations, set out in institutions and agreements that have governed the decades since. This order did real work and held real dangers back, and the volume does not sneer at it. But look at it with the eyes this part trained. However fine and detailed its rules grew, its core is what every between-nations order has been, the fixing in place of the balance of power that held at the moment it was made. The strongest nations of that moment wrote the rules, and the rules, naturally, reflected and secured the positions those nations held. It is, in the volume's carried phrase, a law of a few households in the robe of the law of all under Heaven, and its lawfulness rests finally on the power of those who wrote it, because between nations no lawmaker stands above. This is not a charge against that order more than against any other. It is the plain structure of all of them.
Now the thing that unsettles the fixed order, and it is the volume's own deepest lever. The rules fixed the balance of power of their moment, but output does not hold still. The position of the world's output, who makes what, where the scarce thing is produced and held, is always moving, and when output moves far enough, the rules written to fix an older balance no longer match the real balance underneath them, and sooner or later the rules must shift to follow. This is the volume's root once more, output under everything, now working on the international order itself. An order is written to fix a balance. Output moves under it. The gap between the written balance and the real one widens. And in time the order strains, revises, or breaks, because rules cannot forever hold a balance that output has left behind. The present order is subject to this like every order before it. Whatever balance it fixed, output is already moving under it, and the rules will, in time, be pulled after.
And here the chapter's turn, from the old subject to the new. The output that moves the balance has, until now, always been a familiar kind, grain from the field, goods from the workshop, iron from the mine, the making of material things by human hands and the machines human hands built. Every shift of the international order the volume has traced rode on shifts in that kind of output. But now a wholly new kind of output has entered, one that does not fit the old shape at all. Artificial intelligence is output of a new kind, because it is not the making of a material thing but the making of the very capacity to make, to decide, to know, a capacity that was, until now, the one thing only a human mind supplied. This is why it redraws the map rather than merely adding to it. Earlier new outputs made more or cheaper things. This one makes the thing that makes, and touches the human capacities the whole order was built around, and so it does not merely move the balance within the old frame. It threatens to change the frame.
See why the volume ends here, and could only end here. The whole book dug down to output as the root under law, scarcity, the strong and the weak, the taking between nations. If output is the root, then a wholly new kind of output is the deepest possible disturbance, reaching the root itself. And artificial intelligence is exactly that, a new output that does not just shift who holds the scarce thing but changes what the scarce thing is, because when the capacity to make and to know can itself be produced, the oldest scarcities, of skill, of knowledge, of the human capacities that sorted people and nations, are thrown into question. The volume traced law as a tool grown from the ground of scarce output, and now stands at the moment when the ground itself is moving in a way it never has. That is why the last chapter must be about this, and why it must be the last. Everything the volume built points here, to the edge where the new output meets the old law, and the old law begins its last and hardest chase after a thing it was never built to catch.
The discipline holds even here, at the volume's most present and most charged subject. To name artificial intelligence as a new output that redraws the map is not to praise it or damn it, not to say which nation's hold on it is right, not to prophesy doom or deliverance. It is to place it in the volume's frame, as output, the root the whole book has traced, appearing in a wholly new form. What it will do, whether its gains outweigh its dangers, which nations and which people it will lift and which it will cast down, the reader will judge as it unfolds, holding the one measure. The volume does not hand a verdict on the new output. It hands the frame that lets a person see it for what it is at the root, a new output moving the ground under the law, and it turns, in the next sections, to watch what the law does as it tries to catch up.
So this section sets a forty-first layer. The present international order, however fine its rules, has at its core the fixing in place of a balance of power, a law of a few households in the robe of the law of all under Heaven, resting on the strength of those who wrote it. But output does not hold still, and the position of the world's output is moving, so the rules that fixed an older balance must in time be pulled after the new one. And into this moving order has entered a wholly new kind of output, artificial intelligence, new because it makes not a material thing but the capacity to make and to know, reaching the very root the whole volume traced and threatening to change the frame rather than only the balance within it. The volume places it as output and hands no verdict on it. The next section sets two hard rules about the law and this new output, that the law always lags, and that when it catches up, the law it makes mostly welds the vested interest in place. Let the reader carry this new output into the section that follows.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.