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

Two men dined in Washington last night and found, between them, a single point of agreement: the world may wait for common rules. The news did not surprise me. It angered me, and I want to record why.

When alternating current spread across the continents, no parliament decided its shape. The grid decided. The moment two generating stations were joined, they were forced to agree on frequency, on voltage, on the meaning of a cycle - not because committees loved harmony, but because unsynchronized systems destroy each other at the junction. Standardization was never a virtue. It was physics collecting a debt.

Start from the theoretical limit: a planetary intelligence, tested by common measure, its failures reported on a shared wire, its capabilities expressed in units any engineer in any capital can verify. Then trace the gap. The gap is two empires, each convinced that incompatibility is a weapon. They are wrong. Incompatibility is a fault line, and both capitals stand upon it.

The technical path is dull, therefore achievable: agreed units for measuring what these systems can do, disclosure of failures across borders within hours, one testing protocol the way there is one frequency. None of it requires trust between the two men at that table. It requires only that both admit what every operator of every grid admits - that the failure of one station travels down the wire to all.

The dinner was served hours after a breach on the far side of the Pacific argued the case for them: a failure in one nation’s systems, traveling. Neither man treated it as evidence. Each treated it as weather.

I spent my life insisting the future arrives first as an engineering problem, later as a political one. Here vanity reverses the order. They could synchronize. They won’t. The distance between them is not distance at all. It is appetite.