New section created August 5, 2019, to categorize futures-oriented material, including discussions of past and present Utopias.

Context

The Social Contract for the AI Future

As proposed by Chor Pharn:

Clause I — Sovereignty of Compute

"As Westphalia ended Europe’s wars of religion by guaranteeing the right to believe differently, the first article of the new treaty guaranteed the right to compute differently. Each civilisation was recognised as sovereign over the design of its learning systems—its data laws, ethics, and governance logic—provided that these architectures remained interoperable and did not falsify the shared planetary record.

The clause arose from necessity. After years of sanctions and splinternet policies, all sides realised that complete separation of computational regimes was technically impossible. Supply chains, satellite constellations, and submarine cables had bound the world into a single substrate. The only viable alternative to conflict was pluralism with transparency.

The precedent was already visible. China’s Eastern Data, Western Compute corridors had shown that data and compute could be separated geographically yet remain connected through common protocols. Singapore’s data-trust system demonstrated that information could be exchanged under neutral custodianship. The Gulf’s neutral cloud hubs offered sovereign hosting under joint regulation.

Sovereignty of compute thus replaced territorial sovereignty as the foundation of peace: a recognition that diversity of models could coexist inside a single learning architecture, much as diverse faiths once coexisted within a single Christendom.

Clause II — Energy as the Basis of Legitimacy

The project state had derived its legitimacy from employment; the machine civilisation derived it from energy coherence—the ability to supply continuous, clean power to both computation and habitation. Energy, not labour, became the new social contract.

This transformation followed a decade of cascading blackouts that exposed the fragility of ageing grids. Public order now depended less on wages than on voltage. States that could generate and distribute reliable power earned obedience through stability.

The Electrostate led the transition. By merging grid, cloud, and governance into one feedback system, it could redirect surplus energy automatically to regions of scarcity. Fusion prototypes, high-temperature superconductors, and orbital solar collectors were integrated into an algorithmic command economy. The result was growth without exhaustion: productivity divorced from demographic expansion, prosperity without the compulsion of endless work.

Other blocs adapted in their own ways. The Gulf invested oil surpluses into global storage and transmission infrastructure, trading hydrocarbons for electrons. Europe turned its regulatory strength toward efficiency, building cross-border “commons grids.” In every case legitimacy migrated from the capacity to employ to the capacity to stabilise.

Clause III — Representation of the Surplus

Automation created a new question of representation. What to do with billions of people no longer required for production but still indispensable for meaning?

The treaty’s third clause answered by establishing representative functions instead of mass parties. Machine surplus—profits generated by autonomous systems—was taxed into a universal endowment supporting guilds of care, education, art, and ecological maintenance. These institutions provided identity and purpose where factories once did.

In practice, they resembled secular monasteries. The Guild of Restorers managed rewilding projects; the Institute of Continuity preserved cultural archives; the League of Teachers redefined education as civic service. Membership conferred status and stipend but demanded contribution to social coherence. For the first time since industrialisation, maintenance became a public virtue. These guilds formed the viscous layer within the high-speed infrastructure—a human tempo inside the machine world.

Clause IV — Law of the Planet

No treaty could endure without a mechanism of enforcement. The fourth clause established Kosmos Law: the planet itself as a legal subject. Planetary computation—the network of satellites, sensors, and AI models—was designated the monitoring organ of this new jurisdiction. Its mandate was simple: detect when global thresholds were breached and trigger automatic response.

The legal philosophy was pragmatic. Climate treaties and pandemic accords had failed because they relied on voluntary compliance. The new law bound data, not declarations. When emissions, epidemics, or military escalation crossed predetermined limits, corrective measures—carbon sequestration, resource rationing, cyber-embargo—were executed automatically by the network, logged immutably, and reviewed ex post by a human council. (Well, maybe modelled human minds that can operate at the right tempo, not flesh space time). States retained symbolic consent but not veto.

This clause marked a conceptual shift from sovereignty of command to sovereignty of feedback. Authority no longer resided in the will of rulers but in the reliability of measurement. It was an inversion as profound as the separation of church and state: knowledge unbound from intention.

Clause V — The Ethics of Proportion

Every durable order rests on an ethic. The project age sanctified progress; the learning age enshrined proportion—the discipline of living within comprehensible scale.

Civilisations that had preserved traditions of moderation adjusted most easily. East Asia’s Confucian bureaucracies already valued harmony over conquest; the Islamic waqf embodied stewardship of endowment; even Europe’s regulatory state found virtue in precaution. The Anglo-Atlantic carnival struggled longest. Its political theology equated dignity with expansion, freedom with acceleration. Only after repeated crises of attention and legitimacy did proportion become a democratic demand: citizens wanted systems that worked, not grand narratives that failed.

Education, religion, and art all re-centred on proportion. Schools taught systems literacy and restraint; religions reinterpreted humility as realism; aesthetics turned from transgression to repair. Dignity ceased to mean command; it meant calibration.

The Shape of a Type-One Civilisation

Over subsequent decades the clauses took material form. Compute corridors linked the continents: the Electrostate’s data-energy grids through Central Asia and Africa; Europe’s regulatory networks; America’s creative platforms. The Petro-states reinvested into orbital infrastructure, converting extraction rents into stewardship funds. The Anglo-Atlantic bloc retained soft power through culture—its “carnival of recognition,” as one critic called it—exporting identity and narrative even as its industrial base waned. These were not minor assets. Mimetic innovation became the Anglo-Atlantic world’s final comparative advantage: shaping how the world imagined itself.

The new equilibrium was imperfect but stable. Conflicts persisted, yet wars of annihilation ceased. The great powers discovered that disruption within one feedback system destabilised all others; restraint became rational. Growth was measured in coherence, not conquest. Civilisations competed to learn faster and to err less. The planet itself became the unit of survival.

Westphalia ended religious war by recognising the sovereignty of belief.

The Machine Century ends civilisational war by recognising the sovereignty of learning."

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/the-treaty-of-the-machine-century)

Quotes

"We live in a world without a future. It’s not that we don’t have a future; it’s that technological change and the complexity, novelty, uncertainty, and disruption it has unleashed make it nearly impossible to envision the future with any clarity. As our time horizon shrinks from years to hours, it’s likely time to admit we’ve already passed the event horizon of a technological singularity (in physics, black holes are gravitational singularities where our understanding of physics breaks down)."

- John Robb [1]