On: Trump-XI summit aims to head off an AI arms race

The chroniclers of my city record a peace worth remembering: Lodi, 1454. Four powers exhausted by war agreed to spare one another, and for forty years Italy knew order, because Lorenzo the Magnificent held the balance and every state watched every other. The peace died in 1494, when Charles VIII brought over the Alps an army of a kind the treaty never contemplated. Treaties govern the wars men expect. Fortune sends the ones they do not.

So I read that the two princes meet to spare the world a race in these new machines, and the flatterers invoke the American and the Soviet who stepped back from the fire forty years ago. I ask the only question that matters: what is there to count? Atomic weapons demanded ore, furnaces, tests visible from the sky. These machines are made of thought; they multiply in a cellar; no inspector sees them. A pact that cannot be verified is a fortress of paper - it protects nothing, but persuades its builders they are safe.

Let each prince sign with the fox and arm with the lion. The one who disarms in fact while his rival disarms only in words has lost before the ceremony ends.

Yet I note one novelty. The men who build these machines serve profit and reputation, not either prince - mercenaries, by every test I know. But mercenaries usually flee the fire. Here the fire burns their own houses too; the makers live inside the danger they sell. Skin in the game, at last, on both sides of the wall. This gives me more hope than the princes’ handshake.

A republic would do better than either throne: bind itself publicly before its citizens, who keep faith longer than any prince, and never praise peace while neglecting its own arms. The ruler who trusts a rival’s word alone has made fortune his general. She is a poor one.