Across this series, I've traced a clear, compounding trajectory.
Uneven global access feeds into platform dependency, which rapidly hardens into Asymmetric Corporate Expansion — a reality where a tiny handful of commercial boardrooms dictate the boundaries of global productivity.
None of this points to a single inevitable outcome.
It points to a system under pressure.
In the first post, I looked at the idea that AI is pulling us in two directions at once.
Massively accelerated disruption on one side, and the promise of prosperity on the other.
What both framings gloss over is a more uncomfortable question:
Who actually gets access to that prosperity?
Because AI isn't arriving evenly.
There’s a framing I’ve been coming back to recently, borrowed from Mo Gawdat.
During the Cold War, the dominant paradigm was MAD — Mutually Assured Destruction — but Gawdat suggests that with AI, we have the potential for something different:
MAP — Mutually Assured Prosperity.
It’s a neat idea, but I’m not convinced it’s that simple.
Over the last few posts, I’ve been writing about AI from a fairly close range — how it changes engineering teams, delivery dynamics, capability development, and the shape of organisations.
In other words, the micro view — what happens inside teams when capability, speed, and decision-making all shift at once.
But the more I’ve thought about it, the harder it’s becoming to ignore the bigger picture, as the same forces are playing out at a much larger scale.
Most of the conversation around AI today is anchored in the near term.
Engineers are asking how it changes their workflow. Product teams are experimenting with copilots. Founders are looking for leverage. There’s a steady undercurrent of anxiety about junior roles disappearing, but it tends to be framed as a tactical problem, something to manage, mitigate, or route around.
I’m less focused on that layer.
Not because it isn’t important, but because it feels like we are still looking at the first-order effects of a much larger shift.