Governments Are Racing for AI Dominance. Their Citizens Are Not Ready.

Governments Are Racing for AI Dominance. Their Citizens Are Not Ready.

The most consequential technology race in human history is underway.

You, dear governments, dear world leaders, are in it. You are building data centres, controlling chips, picking sides. The right questions are being asked.

But there is a blindspot. And it could cost you more than losing the race.

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There will be an inflection point. In his essay “The Adolescence of Technology,” Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, writes: “If the exponential continues (…) then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.”

He adds that this picture probably underestimates the likely rate of progress.

The economics are simple. Once replacing human labour with AI becomes the more efficient and more economical choice, organisations will make it.

The risk of a sudden unemployment and meaning crisis after this point is real. No government seems to have solved this. And none seems to be moving nearly fast enough.

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Social readiness is the capacity of a society to absorb, adapt to, and find meaning in a world moving faster than any other time in history, driven today most acutely by AI. (Working definition.)

It is not a soft metric. It is a hard geopolitical variable. And it may be a major ingredient for geopolitical power in 2040.

The AI proliferation debate is not only about who sells chips to whom. It is about whether your citizens are cognitively, emotionally, and socially equipped for what comes after. Whether your education systems prepared people for roles that did not yet exist. Whether your social contracts can hold under pressure. Whether your citizens can find purpose and meaning in a world where traditional work may no longer be the primary organising principle of life.

Stop sugarcoating. Take action today. Move as fast as you can. Because you are already late.

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