Nations protect themselves.
Gunpowder changed for good how nations protect themselves.
Ancient weapons were relatively cheap and easy to produce.
After firearms, as Adam Smith observed, national defense an expensive, perennial line item.1
When nations feel threatened, they raise their walls. As walls rise, international trade falls.
The Industrialization Revolution blossomed the imagination for a peaceful world united by free trade; but it also provided a militaristic edge to the winner, and someone must win unless all nations agree to complete equality (and follow through by will or by force).
Threatened by the emergent winner, nations, like the United States, raised their walls and scaled industrialization at home to thwart the British Empire. Other European nations followed suit.
The world wars unleashed the stockpiles of firearms, causing unprecedented havoc.
From the ashes, peace emerged in Europe and a post-war consensus helped restrain bellicose behavior, and free trade helped cement this consensus.
But the consensus wasn’t global. The Cold War between democracy and communism loomed over the world.
Trade was freer, but limited as discernment and defenses were in high demand.
The end of the Cold War saw a resurgence of the post-war hope for wider peace and freer trade.
AI is the new gunpowder, and it is the new costly line item to maintain nation defense.
Nations feel threatened during this build-out, and walls are being raised higher.
It also promises a revitalization of trade for those aligned in a neo-Cold War.
America and China are racing to recapitulate the dominance of the British Empire during the Industrial Revolution. They will attempt to lower walls to exchange their technologies. Surely, some will accept the trade-off.
The UK is staying out of the global race, building defenses, and integrating American AI technology until it scales up its own (as a counter example).
Both approaches may work, and neither formally causes peace (or war).
Industrialization came with promises of global peace and utopian dreams, and it was not so. Yet the world did also improve in some respects.
AI came with promises of global peace and utopian dreams; this will not be so.
The extent of free trade will depend on the global theater.
World peace is never the fruit of technology per se. (Nor is war.)
But technology may change some things for good, though the extraction of its fruits requires harnessing.
AI may not become a horror story, and AI may be less than machines of loving grace.
Then again, gunpowder, and now AI, changes things.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. 5, Ch. 1, Pt. 1.