US Intelligence, Power

A is a book about the new forces that will remake the American republic between the next dew decades- and about whether those forces will concentrate power or distribute it, deliver shared flourishing or hollow out the very agency that self-government requires.

This what this book is about - and it is important

In 2026 the United States turned two hundred and fifty years old. A quarter of a millennium is long enough to have buried the certainties of every generation that built it, and short enough that the country still argues, in almost the same words, over questions the founders left unresolved.

The horizon is deliberately distant. Anyone who forecasts a single decade in technology courts embarrassment; anyone who forecasts two and a half centuries courts ridicule.

The point is not prediction in the narrow sense. It is to take seriously the proposition that the coming wave of machine intelligence, biological engineering, and physical-science breakthroughs is not merely another turn of the industrial crank, but a transformation on the scale of the ones that produced the modern nation in the first place - and to ask what kind of country comes out the other side.