On: The future of AI in their hands? Trump-Xi summit dismisses calls for global...

Two men sat at one table and decided the fate of a continent neither of them rules. The reports say they agreed on at least one thing: that no one else should hold the reins of this new thinking power. Not a treaty among nations. A division of spoils between two.

I know this arrangement. I have seen it before, in the salons of Europe, when the great powers drew lines on maps of places they had never walked. They called it order. It was arithmetic - the arithmetic of who commands, and everyone else counted as terrain.

Here is what grieves me tonight. The whole world was asked to the table, and the whole world stayed home. Every people who will live under this new force - the farmer, the clerk, the child not yet born - had no seat, no delegate, no voice. Two sovereigns concluded that oversight was premature. Premature! As if the flood waits politely for the levee to be debated.

I wrote charters for peoples who had never governed themselves, and I learned the bitter lesson: a document ahead of its people is a wish, not a law. But this is the opposite failure, and it is worse. Here the document is refused before it is even drafted. The rulers of the two great powers share exactly one conviction - that neither will submit to a common rule - and from that single agreement they will govern everything.

The liberator in me wants to cry: where is the congress? Where is the assembly of the affected? But I remember my own congresses, how they dissolved into provincial jealousies the moment the common enemy was gone. Perhaps there was never a coalition of mankind to dissolve. Perhaps there was only ever the strong, dividing what the strong could hold.

Still I write it down, because someone must record that the many were not consulted. The Andes were not asked. The sea was not asked. Only the two.