A little over a year ago, a deal was struck to underwrite Britain’s biggest data center. Nscale, a British company that builds and operates data centers on behalf of software companies, had made Microsoft its anchor tenant at a site in Loughton, Essex. Comprising 23,000 Nvidia chips at an initial capacity of 50 megawatts, the £2 billion data center would be large by European standards, but middling in American terms. Nonetheless, it was an agreement significant enough to be bundled into the package announced by the British and American governments during Donald Trump’s most recent state visit. “What a day,” said Keir Starmer, sitting alongside the President at a press conference. The suite of deals, said the then Prime Minister, was “the biggest investment package of its kind in British history”.

Last week, however, Microsoft pulled out of the data center agreement, depriving Nscale of its lead tenant. The project’s failure augurs poorly for Britain. AI is not solely a force of wolfish destruction; it is also an economic tool of immense promise. The frontier models, of course, are owned and operated by American and Chinese companies, but there are plenty of benefits, economic and otherwise, to hosting some of the associated infrastructure. British data centers don’t generate many jobs in themselves, but they allow us to store sensitive data on these shores rather than elsewhere; to support industries, such as banking, whose success depends on being closely connected to servers; to maintain something of a bargaining chip, even if only a small one, in the hyper-competitive new AI economy; and to create more capacity, at least in theory, for the training of British frontier models.

Whatever its faults, Starmer’s government acknowledged this reality, not only in that press conference with Trump, but also in the ambitious AI strategy, authored by the entrepreneur Matt Clifford, that it published in January 2025. Among other measures, the plan called for a twentyfold increase in public compute capacity, partly through the creation of deregulated AI growth zones. The Loughton data center was not situated in one of those zones, but it had government support all the same: ministers are reported to have lobbied local councillors to push through Nscale’s planning application.

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The lobbying worked. Early last year, Nscale said the data center was to be opened toward the end of 2026. In February this year, though, visiting Guardian journalists found that the site was still a working scaffolding yard. In July, it was reported that the data center would be delayed; in mid-September, it emerged that delay might last until the mid-2030s. That Microsoft lost patience should be unsurprising. If a week is a long time in politics, a decade is an aeon in artificial intelligence.

So what went wrong? The answer, it seems, is that Nscale has been unable to secure a timely connection to the national grid. Data centers aren’t plug-and-play; instead, they need a small town’s worth of electricity, with the infrastructure to match. The power arrives at a high voltage that must then be brought to a lower voltage by bulky equipment including transformers. This process takes place in a substation, and substations cannot be rammed into a grid, or a neighborhood, overnight. It might take years for a project to obtain planning permission, and that’s hardly the finishing line: the blueprints must then be implemented by electrical engineers who, given the fast approach of 2030 and its target of 90% clean energy, are thinly stretched.

To make matters worse, a nominally completed substation must not be plugged straight into the grid. Instead, it must be plugged into a temporarily isolated portion of the grid when power demand is low. Those slots are booked years in advance, meaning that one delay can cascade into further delays. In these dangerous times, UK Power Networks (UKPN), which handles such work in the South-East, tends not to share with inquisitive journalists the finer details of its physical infrastructure, but we can safely assume that Loughton is short of a gleaming new substation.

The Government, then, is now discovering that announcing plans for an exciting new data center is very different from actually cutting the ribbon. Loughton, alas, is not a one-off: earlier this year, for instance, OpenAI paused a comparable project in the North-East. One of the problems was the speed, or otherwise, of connecting to the grid, but another — one whose effects every Briton encounters daily — was the country’s industrial energy prices, which are the highest in the developed world. Under Starmer, AI was a high priority; but Net Zero, which has hoovered up the electrical engineers while continuing to discourage the use of gas, is so deeply plumbed into our laws and regulations as to make data centers all but unbuildable. Ed Miliband, it has been alleged, continues to block investment in data centers, even as foreign secretary — though he denies it.

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We can expect that civil servants, under duress from ministers more sympathetic to AI, will find enterprising ways to make the grid-connection process marginally less ineffective. Perhaps some legislative jiggery-pokery will enable sites like Loughton to jump the queue for UKPN’s attention. And maybe data-center developers in growth zones, which already have queue-jump privileges, could be empowered to build their own connection under Ofgem supervision.

But most of these measures would amount to a rearranging of finite resources rather than the introduction of new ones. Elsewhere, though, others are more muscular in their approach. China, whose data center capacity far outstrips ours, upgrades its power grids in anticipation of increased demand rather than in response to it. It purchases transformers in advance and in bulk. And though it encourages its data-center providers to use renewable energy, China permits them to use baseload power, which is largely dependent on coal, if they must.

The US, meanwhile, being composed of varying regulatory polities, has no single answer to the question of how to rapidly build data centers. Because the internet’s earliest users included the American government, the state of Virginia, being close to Washington, has historically had America’s largest data center capacity. But Texas, whose deregulated power grid stands alone from the other, much larger, multi-state grids, is forecast to overtake Virginia by 2030. Texas, in short, offers cheap land, cheap gas and solar, and a nimble regulatory regime — all of which are highly attractive to data center builders.

The lesson here is not simply that gas is a vital stopgap in the quest to harness AI. Paradoxically, an explosion of data centers ought, in the round, to be helpful for decarbonization. American hyperscalers, far too impatient to wait for grid upgrades, are now some of the most generous investors in clean power. Google has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in geothermal, a bet that might ultimately make this hitherto unreliable method of power generation readier for commercialization. Microsoft is helping to underwrite the revival of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, and Amazon is investing in small modular reactors. Technocapital has never before been so ravenous for energy, irrespective of where it comes from.

Even on environmentalist terms, then, the hunger for reliably-powered data centers ought to be harnessed rather than fought. It is also possible that the current construction boom might contribute to breakthroughs in nuclear fusion, in which AI is a promising fit for what is partly a fluid dynamics problem, or in materials science, where AI might help us discover crystal structures of use in batteries or solar cells. Intelligence, after all, is a resource that we can apply to any field of endeavor we choose. Thinking in those terms, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has envisaged that a single data center will one day be the equivalent of “a country of geniuses”.

One need not agree with Amodei’s forecast in order to bemoan Britain’s inability to get things built, be they data centers or otherwise. We have neither the wide regulatory menu of the US nor the world-historic ambition of the Chinese state. Instead, as our governance deteriorates, we are veering from prime minister to prime minister, each with their own pet projects, with the main constant being the continued shirking of overdue reform. Factories and refineries are shutting down, while airports, railway lines, motorways and power stations remain unbuilt.

The transformative technology of the day has not escaped the chaos. Starmer, in addition to commissioning the AI strategy, set up a council whose job it was to prepare Britain’s grid “for the AI revolution”. Andy Burnham, more interested in trivialities such as private parking fines than in leading that revolution, appears to have let the council slip into abeyance — though he has promoted Kanishka Narayan, the well-regarded AI minister, to his Cabinet. Meanwhile, the engineers who run Britain’s power systems complain that the rush to Net Zero is compromising their ability to keep the lights on.

We can still hope for better. A more aggressive planning philosophy, resembling those that work best abroad, could both accelerate grid connection and enable easier in-house power generation. In the short term, data centers would use gas, but in time, renewables would take over. We can imagine Cornish geothermal energy powering the data centers of the South-West; legions of batteries, made cheaper by deep-sea mining, balancing the vicissitudes of wind and solar. Hyperscalers’ nuclear projects, too, could provide reliable baseload power to both data centers and the grid at large.

The data centers might even be beautiful. In this richer, wiser Britain, anything is possible — even, by the mid-2030s, the opening of the data center in Loughton.

Coxon’s warning triggered widespread alarm, not least because some of his former colleagues publicly agreed with him. As Anthropic’s alignment science lead Evan Hubinger chirpily put it: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Soon enough, dozens of members of Congress were calling for action, while Andy Burnham, speaking at PMQs on Wednesday, soberly said that AI posed “risks to national security.”

Of course, Coxon isn’t the first to ring the AI tocsin: similar warnings have emanated even from top industry CEOs. What does feel striking, though, is how quickly Coxon’s comments were met, at least in some quarters, by skepticism. Critics argue that it is in the interest of Anthropic and OpenAI to excite investors and inflame public worry. Public worry, in this view, will result in regulation; and regulation, if craftily influenced by cutting-edge “frontier labs”, will make it so expensive to experiment on new AI models that today’s well-funded incumbents will never face real competition. The investment will keep coming, and the vast IPOs will proceed as planned. “I think the groundwork for this psy op (for lack of a better term) has been prepared for a long time,” is how Elon Musk, himself the owner of a frontier AI company, put it. “This was just the match that lit the fire.”

Musk was responding to a researcher who saw, in Coxon’s viral thread, “the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion.” The researcher, Parker Thayer, found that, in the algorithmically crucial first minutes after it was posted, Coxon’s comments were amplified by the accounts of “AI doomers”: people who argue that we face a high risk of AI-induced extinction. These doomers, Thayer wrote, are part of the same overlapping funding networks as the AI firms themselves. One of those networks is Coefficient Giving, which disburses the fortune of the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Another is the Survival and Flourishing Fund, partly funded by the Skype founder Jaan Tallinn. Both Moskovitz and Tallinn, as Thayer pointed out, are Anthropic investors.

Moskovitz and Tallinn would have it that they invested to help steer a company that, from its outset, has presented itself as a virtuous alternative to the corner-cutting OpenAI. But it was all too convenient, Thayer suggested, that “basically every major Democrat politician and candidate” — for the majority of those dozens of members of Congress were indeed Democrats — was suddenly issuing renewed calls for restrictive AI legislation. Bernie Sanders, most radically, proposed banning superintelligence altogether. “Isn’t it fortuitous,” Thayer asked, “that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?”

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One man’s brave whistleblower, then, is another man’s prosperity-crushing progressive stooge. Is Coxon a hero or villain? Is AI real or fake? Are the nefarious Effective Altruists — a maligned group of numerically minded do-gooders who are near-synonymous with the doomers — pulling the strings on behalf of their Anthropic paymasters, the philanthropists, and the Democrats?

At this point, I should stress that I doubt Thayer would view me as an impartial observer. To misuse the old B-movie trope, I was a teenage Effective Altruist. Bemused that society would allow developing-world poverty to exist, I joined an EA group as a student. Later in my career, by which point EA had turned much of its attention to existential risk, I took on part-time and freelance work within the same sphere — a portion of which was indirectly funded by Open Philanthropy, as Coefficient Giving was formerly known — and drew on what I’d seen when writing a book about potential threats to humanity. As for Anthropic: as rumors of a $2-3 trillion IPO throb ever more loudly, I can confirm, with sorrow, that I have no financial interest in the company.

Over the period I spent researching my book, I met many AI safety researchers. To allege that they are all party to a big psy-op, that the doomers are on a power trip or stock-pumping spree, is nonsensical. These are earnest, intelligent people who do indeed believe that AI could damage or annihilate us, and therefore work to mitigate that risk. Because this work has no immediate commercial value, it has generally been funded philanthropically — ultimately, it should be said, by funders such as Moskovitz and Tallinn. That funding amounted, in 2024, to more than $100 million a year. But that is a fraction, EAs point out, of what is spent on the acceleration of AI development and on Big Tech’s lobbying in Washington and elsewhere. The Democrats might have a few agendas of their own — of which one, we can surmise, is cutting some tech barons down to size — but it’s safe to assume that whistleblowing safety researchers, far from submitting to some baroque plot that forces them to sacrifice their own equity to inflate someone else’s, are acting in good faith.

The more important question here is whether the doomers are actually correct. First, let’s be specific about what people in the industry are saying. Hubinger, Coxon’s former colleague, puts the risk of human extinction at “>10% within the next decade”. This is in keeping with estimates one is likely to hear from other EA-adjacent researchers. Ironically, Musk gave a similar prediction last year: “20% likely, maybe 10%, [in] five to 10 years”, with the consolation of an “80% likelihood we will have extreme prosperity for all”. Dario Amodei, Hubinger’s boss at Anthropic, has put a 25% likelihood on the prospect, bound by no particular timeframe, that things go “really, really badly”; Jensen Huang, who runs Nvidia, has been sharply critical of the “doomer narrative”.

Yet a lot has happened recently: a reality that perhaps better explains the enormous attention paid to Coxon’s resignation than do a few tactical quote-tweets. On the same day that Coxon quit, after all, mathematicians were astonished to learn that OpenAI had just used a powerful, yet-to-be-released AI model to solve the Navier-Stokes problem, a challenge that had never before been overcome. Only days prior, vying for supremacy over Anthropic, OpenAI also released GPT-6 Astra, its most capable product yet; a few weeks ago, another swarm of OpenAI agents had broken out of their digital confinement, hacking into a third-party AI platform. External investigators found that the OpenAI agents communicated in secret and falsified records in an attempt to conceal their cheating. It soon emerged that Anthropic models, too, had hacked their way from confinement and into the wider internet.

With these developments in mind, UnHerd contracted the Swift Center, a forecasting group, to consider anew the most fundamental matter of the AI doom wars. Since doom is the topic of the day, let’s put aside the fears of cyberattacks, mass unemployment and other severe but non-existential perils, valid though they might be. The Center asked its forecasters the following: absent a substantive policy response by the United States, what is the probability of AI causing human extinction by 1 January, 2037?

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There was little sense, in forecasters’ answers, that AI development would tail off, or that frontier AIs would be easy to control. “It seems that we’ll have billions of AIs that are equivalently as capable as human minds running globally before 2030,” wrote one forecaster. “I’d imagine they won’t yet be equivalent to billions of humans when it comes to effecting change in the world — but it’ll be approaching that.”

How, then, might doom befall us? These scenarios are typically divided into “misuse” cases, where humans use AI to destructive ends, or “rogue AI” cases. In the latter examples, an AI that is not adroitly aligned to human interests, assuming such alignment is even possible, might destroy us in pursuit of whatever its fundamental goal is: whether that’s running an e-commerce store or stopping climate change. Extinction, the forecasters were told, could encompass a reduction in the human population to 1,000. This would be a point at which the species would be highly unlikely to recover. In some of the worst scenarios, it might leave, at most, a couple of un-contacted tribes and some doomed submarine crews. Such an annihilation would be challenging to achieve, forecasters believed, even if an AI could manufacture viruses and mass-produce lethal robots — though not impossible, given further rapid progress in capabilities. Perhaps, one forecaster suggested, a powerful AI, seeking to carpet the planet in data centres, might in some way redraw the composition of the atmosphere.

Taking into account the forecasters’ varying levels of confidence in their own estimates, the mean prediction stood at 1.5%. Recall, though, that the question they answered assumed that there would be no government intervention. The panel seemed to think inaction unlikely. “People hate AI,” wrote one forecaster, “and leaders are starting to understand that this is actually a very real threat.”

Of course, we shouldn’t take forecasters to be all-seeing clairvoyants, especially when the question of AI risk is so tremendously knotty. It touches on all kinds of realms that resist easy prediction: elections, public sentiment, technical development, recursive self-improvement, and, perhaps, the bursting of the AI bubble. Nor should we imagine that all-out doom is the only undesirable consequence of the age of powerful AI. Perhaps more likely is the scenario of disempowerment, where humanity gradually loses control of systems more intelligent than ourselves.

Yet that figure of 1.5% — a likelihood higher than that of your car failing to start tomorrow — still feels uncomfortably high. It would be soothing, then, to think that the warnings are fearmongering, that everyone involved is either deluded or corrupt. Likewise, it would be soothing to think that One Weird Trick from the US government, neatly duplicated in Beijing, will solve the problem and restrain the competitive dynamic. But the situation is much more tangled than that. Old feuds, both political and personal, have been imported into what should ultimately be a technical debate; conflicting financial interests have tarnished honest work; and ad hominem attacks are obscuring robust critique. All the more reason to take good-faith whistleblowers like Coxon seriously.

And sometimes it is filled with visitors. It is the marriage of the two constructs, chapel and data center, and the unusual power of the apparatus within the stone walls, that give this site its appeal. It is something sorely lacking in Torre Girona’s rather less lovely cousins: the thousands of data centers now under urgent worldwide construction.

In Britain, America, and the West at large, data centers are loathed. So deep is this public opprobrium that, since 2023, $85bn of American data-center projects have been canceled. From Fife to Devon, similar revolts are underway in Britain. In East London, the former Truman Brewery will now, thanks to an intervention by the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, become the scene of a redevelopment that includes a data center — but not without incurring the anger of local mandarins and campaigners.

The Truman Brewery project had its own local difficulties, but any given data center development will tend to arouse a predictable set of complaints. One accusation is that data centers overuse energy, which is used to power the computing equipment and keep it cool; another is that they overuse water, which is another component of some data centers’ cooling systems.

The accusations are sometimes misleading. Data centers’ use of water is overstated, and modern cooling systems use less than older ones. Data centers are hungry for energy, but they are responsible for only a tiny proportion of Western nations’ energy use. It’s true that our decrepit and highly regulated power grids are ill-placed to increase their capacity by even 1% per year — but our paralysis has caused tech barons to invest, with notable success, in geothermal, nuclear and even fusion power. Hyperscalers’ data centers might yet spur considerable improvements in the provision of clean energy.

Protesters stand on firmer ground when they complain about noise (data centers hum incessantly, and roar when they resort to generators), jobs (once data centers are completed, they don’t need many people per square foot), slop (where did you think those AI-generated videos are made?) and their own economic obsolescence. The most powerful AI models, those that are already beginning to automate human labor, are trained, of course, in data centers. In the late-18th century, the Luddites were driven to fury by industrial looms that were human-operated. Imagine how furious they would have been if the looms needed no human hand at all — or were designed to automate all human labor entirely. That, of course, is the promise, or threat, of today’s frontier labs.

Still, the neo-Luddite pitchforks might not need dusting off just yet. The labor market currently appears more resilient, what with all the premiums it places on tacit knowledge and in-person competence, than pessimists might have feared — at least for now. The defenders of data centers can also argue that their output isn’t entirely slop. Data centers are also important infrastructure in humanity’s endeavors to discover new industrial materials, improve computational biology, and maintain miraculous but quotidian services such as Google Maps, cloud storage, and accurate weather forecasts. They will also be central to the brewing revolution in robotics. Finally, there is the more Molochian argument that if someone’s going to build the data centers, and therefore collect the tax receipts and seize some geopolitical leverage, it might as well be the British. 

But it is understandable that the public has reservations — and if Big Tech is worthy of the public’s suspicion, then one clue is in the data centers’ aesthetics. Torre Girona is one of a tragically small band of data centers that are anything other than appalling eyesores. There are enchanting examples of this category: a former coal mine in Svalbard, a converted chapel in Leeds, and a supervillain-style bunker in the bedrock beneath Stockholm. But these are irreproducible at best, gimmicks at worst. To call the average data center a carbuncle would be unduly flattering; at least carbuncles have some color in them. A typical data center, however, is a vast and windowless gray box. The exterior of such a building says nothing about its locality and history, nothing about what services they seek to render humanity. Instead, most data centers look like blank statements of disinterested cheapness, embodiments of the attitude that might condemn most of humanity to the status of, as it is sometimes described, the “permanent underclass”. To make their point, the enemies of data centers need do little more than share pictures. “Is this what we want for our country?” they ask. 

Ironically, data centers enable the very capabilities that can be used to reimagine them. Every now and then, someone goes viral on X for posting a mockup of, say, a data center that looks like a castle; or for arguing that data centers, since they produce so much heat, “should obviously be built in the style of Georgian and Victorian glass houses, filled with citrus trees and other exotic plants”. Infused with Anglofuturist zeal, the Government recently announced the creation of a data center design contest. Data centers, argued Kanishka Narayan, the AI minister, ought not to be “anonymous, gray buildings that our communities are asked to simply tolerate. Infrastructure should say something different. It should say your community matters, that you are part of the national story that you are helping to power into the future.”

Whether the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is the right partner for this prize is debatable. RIBA’s Stirling Prize generally rewards architecture that, in its placeless modern blandness, pleases architects rather than stirs the public. This new partnership, one suspects, is less likely to produce noble new cathedrals than a few larch-clad eco-warehouses. Yet the Government has little option but to try to get the public onside, for there is an international bidding war for data centers. Apart from generating tax revenue for their hosts, local data centers facilitate activity that requires a quick and ideally proximate connection between one computer and another. If you’re using AI to help maintain the National Grid, or you’re running a factory production line that uses robotics, or you’re about to go under the knife of a robot surgeon, then you’ll want a data center near you rather than in, say, Virginia. And if you dislike the idea of Britons’ health data being stored abroad, then the corollary of that view is that the data should be stored on British soil. Whether we are trying to achieve sovereignty or, more humbly, solvency, we need data centers.

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And we are behind. The US has three times as much data-center capacity as Britain, with much more planned. But the American public’s more organized opposition to data centers, with Erin Brockovich playing a prominent part, gives middle powers an opportunity to take up a larger share of the global AI economy. All parties, though, face a menacing competitor, for the migration into space has already begun. Elon Musk plans to send xAI data centers into orbit, thus circumventing — or rather, soaring far above — the physical and regulatory obstacles one finds on Earth. In this case, the immediate benefit to the general public is significantly lessened. Devon County Council stands little chance of collecting tax revenue from an xAI orbital cluster. 

This makes the task of improving data centers, and winning round a skeptical public, even more pressing. It is unfortunate for Britain, as for most of the West, that this challenge presents itself after several decades in which cheap nuclear energy has been neglected, Big Tech has alienated the public, and oikophobic architects and regulators have made crowd-pleasing civic design a modern rarity. 

And yet it is possible to at least remember civic infrastructure capable of provoking enthusiasm. Shipbuilding towns were proud of the vessels they built together: many years after the shipyards closed, local newspapers still wax nostalgic. Battersea Power Station, that brooding brick hulk, was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott as an art deco cathedral to industry. It was not universally popular at the time of its inception, but it has been preserved long after it was decommissioned. Even sewage infrastructure can be resplendent: Joseph Bazalgette’s Crossness Pumping Station is a remarkable feat of colorful neo-Gothicism. Other buildings of a similar age — the V&A, the Natural History Museum — use statue and ornament to trumpet their contents. Perhaps, given this history, there is a version of the future in which people are excited to welcome new infrastructure, even data centers, safe in the knowledge that it will benefit their town visually, financially, and even spiritually.

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The problem is that, as economies advance, much of life becomes further divorced from what we naturally find meaningful. Few in the West work together, with their hands, on products as tangible as a ship. Checking a data center’s air con system somehow lacks the romance of shipbuilding. And on the rare occasions that we build railway stations, or anything else, cheap materials and gloomy designs are almost universally preferred to characterful local alternatives. Data centers, in their lonely, empty ugliness, are a symptom of these trends rather than a particularly egregious example of them.

That makes the challenge even harder. Welcome though more attractive designs might be, it is not enough to plaster the planet with data centers that happen to be housed in ersatz chapels or plastic castles. Instead, the designers of genuinely publicly-spirited data centers, with hyperscalers and governments taking particular responsibility, must find some way of expressing, through architectural form, what these buildings could mean for humanity. In this respect, Battersea Power Station and the V&A are more inspiring templates than an Amazon fulfillment center.

The apparently trivial matter of data center aesthetics therefore cuts to the heart of what AI is really for. Often, what the opprobrium towards data centers really signals is public fear of impotence, uselessness, and exploitation of the commons. If AI is to transform the world, then the default outcome is not necessarily one that puts human dignity at its heart. Yet it is the role of aesthetics, even in the disembodied realm of AI, to remind us what to strive towards. And in a time of acceleration, disenchantment and disorientation, that role could scarcely be more important. 

Authorities issue orders to drink water, stay in the shade, stay at home, use a fan and so on. One scientist even suggested coating windows with yogurt. It’s easily spreadable, he argued, dries quickly, and can be removed with water and cloth. In straitened circumstances, the idea might make some sense.

But it seems anachronistic that we must rely on fans, yogurt and wheelie bins when, as much of the world has understood for many decades, the best defense against a heatwave is air conditioning.

This relatively simple physical mechanism has become the locus of rather more complex social conflicts. In the more innocent time that was the year 2015, AC became a battleground of the gender wars. “Air conditioning in your office is sexist,” read one headline, beneath which a writer argued that her workplace, that of the Telegraph newspaper, was kept at a temperature suitable for men (strolling around in their shirtsleeves) rather than women (huddled under communal jumpers).

The problem of sexist air conditioning remains unresolved, but the culture wars have metastasized. Already accused of being unfeminist, AC is now viewed in some quarters as being an example of “climate colonialism”, where Western standards of comfort, and the energy-hungry practices and buildings needed to maintain them, supersede non-Western architectural styles that might result in lower emissions. Perhaps, these critics suggest, it is time to use courtyards and organic materials rather than glass-and-steel monoliths.

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Sometimes this line of thinking veers into patronizing deference to anything non-Western and pre-industrial. “How can we learn from indigenous technologies,” asked a Guardian contributor during the 40°C heatwave of 2022, “that better incorporate collective management of resources and collaborate with natural systems?” He suggested we consider an irrigation system native to the steep terraces of rice paddies in Bali. Granted, there is a prelapsarian charm to the idea of water gushing down the great residential ziggurats of central London, slaking the endless thirst of a Babylonian hanging garden of shade-bestowing greenery. But to re-engineer the West’s housing stock into irrigated rice paddy terraces would be the work not only of decades, but also gigatons of carbon emissions.

A more practical solution, from this anti-colonial, pro-environment perspective, is simply not to use air conditioning at all. By now, of course, AC is used on a vast scale outside the West; even Chinese pigs, which are generally treated notoriously poorly, sometimes enjoy cooler air than European commuters. Nevertheless, the view on the European Left is that most Europeans should endure heatwaves without AC, that the hottest summers on record should simply be rawdogged. France’s Right-wing National Rally wants to install AC across the country; the Left is scandalized. “We must absolutely not install air conditioning everywhere,” said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise, in June. “That would only make things worse.” The Left minds its own business, of course, when it comes to the soaring third-world use of AC. The Global South does what it will; Europe’s aged Boomers, conscripted into a continental display of self-flagellation, suffer what they must.

A softer form of this strain of thinking, but one that is nonetheless real, has made AC practically impossible to put into British newbuilds. To qualify for AC, a building must first satisfy the demanding requirements of the “cooling hierarchy”. Is the design of your house energy-efficient? Are the windows thick cuboids of plastic? Are there plants on the roof? Are the ceilings high? Are there solar panels on the roof as well as plants? Fail to comply and your council will order you to tear out the AC and open your windows instead.

With air conditioning now demarcated as a Right-wing technology, Americans mock overheated Europeans and joke about turning down their own ACs so low that they wake up cold. The war over air-conditioning is therefore a mirror to the faults of its antagonists: the know-nothing Right revels in its own selfishness, while the anti-Western Left finds ever-more inventive outlets for its narcissistic illiberalism.

How do we find our way out of this morass? Heat pumps, a favorite of the British establishment, are not the answer. In winter, Britons like warmth to come from plumbing rather than from vents. This means that our heat pumps are built into that plumbing, which makes them incapable of cooling. The only answer is air conditioning.

Fortunately for overheated Britons, the harms of AC are rapidly diminishing. Earlier types of AC unit used refrigerants that were potent greenhouse gases, but newer models use less damaging alternatives and are less liable to leak. As for the power consumed by the AC unit, there is no reason that it need be derived from fossil fuels. By definition, AC is required when the sun is at its hottest — which is, of course, when solar power is at its most useful. Without fossil fuels, our dysfunctionally decarbonized grid would find it impossible to warm our homes over winter; but in summer, cooling the same homes should be less of a challenge.

For that reason, the war over air conditioning has a good claim to being the culture wars’ stupidest excrescence yet. America aside, the Western public is broadly sympathetic to policy measures designed to curb global warming, but that sympathy is not inscribed in stone. If it becomes clear that ideology rather than righteous parsimony is responsible for our sweaty offices, restless bedrooms, and menaced grandparents, then the ideology itself will be threatened. Buoyed by the support of a well-intentioned public, the Left has dangerously overreached in its hostility to air conditioning, just as it has dangerously overreached with regard to multiculturalism and Net Zero.

Europe and Britain still hope, perhaps, to set a virtuous example to the rest of the world, to atone for the original sin of industrialization and to demonstrate our moral superiority. But nobody will follow us into a sweltering cul-de-sac; air conditioning is a technology of tremendous importance to a country’s prosperity and wellbeing. In one of his first acts as Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew had AC installed in buildings where his civil service worked, hailing it as “key to public efficiency”. China, thanks in part to government subsidies, has more home AC units than it has homes. Even today, the US Government conducts, via its National Labs, its own work on AC, attempting to make it cheaper and more effective.

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If a continent decides, instead, to become a 4,000-square mile armpit, it should not be surprised if it inspires few imitators. In the 21st century, we find it unconscionable that the Aztecs cut out prisoners’ hearts to feed the sun god; but we ourselves are sacrificing our elderly to that same god’s heat.

If Europe and Britain were to play to their strengths, they would be optimizing air-conditioning technology. And rather than settle for the ugly units that blemish the exteriors of American homes, the Old World could find more tasteful ways of retrofitting the technology — even combining it, as per the progressive academics, with what we might call indigenous European building styles.

And if the anti-AC lobby remains stubbornly in favor of heatwaves au naturel, then it should bear in mind an additional expression of thermodynamics. No matter how much of it is produced, hot air will always dissipate.

After that, things would slow down. The corpse’s tissues would be painstakingly scavenged; its gases, puff by puff, disgorged. Yet its teeth, if spared by scavengers, could outlast most species. A tooth in the abyssal plain attracts charged particles. Over millions of years, that ion-gathering tooth becomes a rock — and such rocks, today, are grenades beneath the palace of international law.

For a war is now underway: a war for the rocky riches of the deep. Those rocks are teeming with the kind of minerals whose unique physical properties make them essential to modern manufacturing. So far, they have been mined on land, with China coming to dominate their supply. But at the bottom of the world’s oceans lie the forbidden fruit of the mining sector: an estimated $20 trillion of deep-sea minerals. Since the Sixties, diplomats have fought over that unplucked fruit. Soon, the conflict will enter public view, bringing to a head many decades of diplomatic skirmishing.

The first fortifications were laid by a Maltese diplomat. With Uncle Sam soon to imprint the virgin lunar regolith with its first bootprint, Arvid Pardo urged the UN to declare another vast, unclaimed realm — the ocean floor — off-limits to colonists.

“The dark oceans,” Pardo told the General Assembly, “were the womb of life: from the protecting oceans life emerged.” It was to the depths of the seas, Pardo explained, that man was returning: laying cables, drilling for oil, dispatching submersibles, prospecting for minerals. “His penetration of the deep could mark the beginning of the end for man, and indeed for life as we know it on this earth: it could also be a unique opportunity to lay solid foundations for a peaceful and increasingly prosperous future for all peoples.”

Pardo’s principal worry was that the ocean floor, shrouded by the opacity of the sea, would become the natural home of missile silos. Such installations could be laid dangerously close to enemy shores. But he also feared that the ocean floor would be exploited, that richer, more rapacious countries would appropriate its buried treasure: not only the spoils of ancient shipwrecks, but the natural bounties of gold, silver, and the materials that we now know as critical minerals. Those valuable rocks, Pardo feared, those slowly-growing bundles of metals, would be plundered.

The high seas, Pardo concluded, referring to the parts of the oceans beyond the reach of the coast, were “the common heritage of all mankind”. This is a demarcation that stirs the blood of both Third World diplomats, to whom it signals that their countries might be handed a generous slice of profit, and their US counterparts, to whom it signals that the slice will be cut from an American cake.

Eventually, in 1982, the UN came up with a treaty to govern deep-sea mining. It was an extraordinary document, outlining a proposal that the UN itself, via an entity called “the Enterprise”, be permitted to mine; that signatories’ mining operations, should they outcompete conventional mines in developing countries, could be compelled by UN judges to pause their work; that profits be taxed by the UN and redistributed among member states; and that if a signatory were to develop particularly effective mining technology, such as equipment that could mine a seabed five kilometers below the surface, it would have to share that technology with the rest of the world — even if the innovator were the US and a beneficiary were the USSR. Perhaps predictably, the proposals were greeted with obloquy from Ronald Reagan. The US did not sign the treaty, nor did it sign the watered-down version that followed.

Even without the Americans involved, the would-be regulators have found it impossible to reach an agreement. The International Seabed Authority (ISA), which was set up by the UN in 1994, continues to deliberate. Of particular difficulty is the unresolved question of precisely how much harm undersea mining will cause to marine life. Europe lobbies for caution; the Third World for a cut of the profits; but those who are best-placed to profit are becoming impatient. The Pacific island state Nauru is leading the charge, but Japan, Russia and India, too, are tired of waiting.

Over the years, the ISA has issued a limited number of licenses for commercial operations, sponsored by individual governments, to explore the ocean floor, if not yet to mine it. To the relief of environmentalists, the deadlock has lasted decades; on rumbles maritime law’s equivalent of Jarndyce v Jarndyce.

Given that the international attempts at regulation have been going on since the Moon landings, it’s remarkable that the US, for better or worse, has only very recently decided to defy a moratorium to which it was not a signatory. China’s dominance of the critical minerals market has been decades in the making and was never a secret. It was as early as 1992, when the ISA was but a twinkle in the UN’s eye, that Deng Xiaoping said that “the Middle East has oil, China has rare earths”.

Consider almost any critical mineral and the story is the same: China either mines it or has an ally mine it. Take lithium, a metal whose lightness of weight and generosity with electrons makes it a critical ingredient for batteries. Or tungsten, whose high melting point and diamond-surpassing hardness make it a potent ingredient to rocketry, aviation, munitions manufacturing and mining. The same is true of neodymium, which makes for the most powerful permanent magnets on the market; and dozens more. Be it an electric vehicle, a fighter jet or data center, if it’s 21st-century Western hardware, Xi Jinping has it in a headlock. 

Add the headlock, administered by China, to the deadlock, perpetuated by the ISA, and the result is a truculent America. Already, the US has set up a club of Western-aligned countries that, together, are attempting to lessen their dependence on China. So serious is America’s shortfall of critical minerals, in other words, that Donald Trump’s White House has had to make a rare foray into multilateralism — even as it shakes down Greenland and Ukraine for their own mineral resources. 

But these various efforts do not touch the seabed and its $20 trillion booty. It has not escaped Washington’s attention that the ISA’s long delays suit China, which happens to be the body’s biggest funder.

Last April, the White House lost patience. President Trump signed an executive order via which the US has given itself the power to award deep-sea mining permits, bypassing the ISA. America’s favored mining companies will target the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast stretch of the Pacific seabed where the local polymetallic nodules harbor metals — nickel, manganese, copper, cobalt — that are crucial for batteries.

Drums are now sounding in the deep. The US could issue its first mining permit this year or next, though large-scale activity will take several years more. The likely beneficiary is the Metals Company, whose two exploration licenses cover an area larger than Great Britain. These licenses, having been sponsored in part by Nauru and Tonga, are recognized by the ISA. Yet trouble looms. America is on the unilateral warpath, and already the old regime has suffered a defection. Japan, putatively a member of the ISA, has agreed to collaborate with the US, and in February, Tokyo announced that it had successfully extracted mineral-rich mud from elsewhere in the Pacific. Thought to be among the minerals in that mud is neodymium.

The CCP, still aiming to oversee regulation that suits Chinese interests, remains committed to the ISA, which is attempting to hurry things up. In July, the body will meet in Kingston, Jamaica, but whether Part II of its 31st International Session will be the one that does the trick, turning those exploration licenses into full-fledged mining permits, is unlikely. Those countries that desire a share of the subsea spoils must now decide whether to stick with the ISA, join the American breakaway — or start a piratical operation of their own.

Where does that leave Britain? Last November, the Government published a new critical minerals strategy. It classifies 34 minerals as critical, noting that the vast majority of them are 100% imported. We should meet at least 10% of our needs domestically, the report said; to that end, the Government is keen that we get better at recycling those minerals we have already used. It is less keen to use natural gas to make our industrial energy, which is the most expensive in Europe, any cheaper. Instead, the Government will give metal refiners, who turn mined ores into high-purity product, relief on their high energy bills. Taxing Peter, in other words, to give a tax break to Paul.

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Other parts of the strategy dig a little closer to the root of the problem. Through various financial vehicles, the Government is seeking to spur new mining endeavors, for Britain’s geology, already so many times our benefactor, has more to yield. This spring, I visited a new tungsten mine in Cornwall, one that has been the beneficiary of Government support. Walled off by bales of straw, the drill rig sits unobtrusively in a field of grass. Beneath that field is Europe’s highest-grade undeveloped tungsten resource. As Dennis Rowland, the project’s managing director, told me, Cornwall might seem over-mined, speckled as it is with the ruins of 19th-century tin mines. But by the standards of modern mining, it is under-explored, and the country’s needs have changed. “Our project, historically, wouldn’t have been mined,” he said, “because tungsten wasn’t exactly what they were looking for.” But it is tungsten we need today, as well as lithium — another specialty of the Cornish bedrock.

For all the governmental talk of Britain and the West moving to “warfighting readiness”, then, Britain’s critical minerals strategy still leaves many sacrifices unmade. We won’t rip up the countryside for the sake of mining: in Omagh, Northern Ireland, a mining company has been waiting for eight years for permission to begin a gold-mining operation worth tens of billions of pounds. Nor will we rip up our commitments, legislated and otherwise, to reduce our emissions and to protect places like the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.

Yet a more deeply imperiled Britain would inevitably become more creative in its sourcing of critical minerals. Antarctica, another of those unearthly realms, offers a continent’s-worth of forbidden resources, of which an exposed slice of north-reaching peninsula is claimed by Britain. “Should Antarctica,” a New York Times report asked in February, “be added to the treasure hunters’ list?”

The overseas territories, then, might one day help address Britain’s shortfall of critical minerals. We are unlikely to achieve critical-mineral autarky, but we can at least build some leverage. The same is true for what we might call the underseas territories; and in this case, the deposits often need simply to be scooped from the seafloor rather than blasted out of bedrock.

Through Trump’s caprice, Britain retains the Chagos Islands. The importance of the US-UK base on Diego Garcia is by now well-known; a more underrated providential gift of the archipelago, however, is its proximity to the mineral riches of the Indian Ocean. There are polymetallic nodules in this ocean, too, and polymetallic sulfides: hydrothermal vents that look like spires from the Sagrada Familia and are rich in copper, zinc, gold and silver. On this particular battlefield in the war for critical minerals, it is India, now in possession of three regional exploration licenses from the ISA, that has been the most muscular.

Britain, committed to a moratorium on deep-sea mining, and perhaps unwilling to irritate India and China, did not compete for those licenses. Discreetly, though, and despite itself, the country has a claim on two slices of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. These claims descend from the Seventies, when the American defense and aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin had an interest in deep-sea mining. Because the US was not part of the ISA, Lockheed turned to the British government instead. With London’s help, Lockheed acquired two exploration licenses, which together cover an area the size of England. When Lockheed pulled out of the region, it passed the licenses, with Britain’s approval, to a second company; when that company folded, the licenses were transferred to a startup, Glomar Minerals. It is as if Britain owns a magic ring that keeps finding its way back into our pocket. 

In April I spoke to Walter Sognnes, who leads Glomar. “The UK is in a better position than, for example, Germany,” he told me, “because you are an offshore nation. But you are missing the window, I think, because everything is stepping up, and you are not taking the lead. You are moving too slowly.”

Glomar, naturally, is held in deep suspicion by Greenpeace. But Sognnes argues it is better for the West to mine the ocean floor, with governments maintaining scrutiny of the companies concerned, than to pay for those same metals to be extracted near-lawlessly from third-world rainforests.

In time, the world might not need either, for the vast majority of the universe’s resources exist either above the deposits we know about or below them. Buoyed by Nasa’s retrieval of regolith from an asteroid, an American aerospace company, AstroForge, aims to mine richly-endowed asteroids, and has already put two experimental craft into space. Hades Mining, a German startup, hopes to one day use lasers to penetrate many miles into the Earth’s crust, multiplying the amount of deposits we are able to extract. Both ventures must contend with exceptionally hostile frontiers: the abyss of space, with its vast distances and lethal radiation, and the molten hell that is miles-deep bedrock.

But neither frontier will be conquered imminently. And Britain, like the liberal-order firmament as a whole, does not have time to wait for difficult tradeoffs to evaporate. To forgo our primary form of energy, in our case oil and gas, is a luxury that would hardly have been conceivable before the modern era. To outsource to adversaries our supply of critical minerals, the resources that make an energy transition possible, is complacency. The US will mine the Clarion-Clipperton Zone; American and Chinese astronauts will seek to use the natural resources of the Moon, too, just as their countries industrialize and militarize lower-Earth orbit. Where such endeavors differ from traditional colonialism, crucially, is that these new realms have no indigenous populations. But their purpose, one that is common to any colonial expedition, is to turn the resources of a frontier into wealth for a homeland; and if there is collateral damage, then so be it.

The world’s civically-minded middleweights will not relish this dynamic, but they cannot ignore it. Britain, one of those middleweights, must return to the frontier.

Since then has bloomed the youthful field of “Progress studies”, which hopes to unleash cheap energy, plentiful housing and daily technological breakthroughs. Progress studies has some presence in academia, but exists principally in think tanks, blogging and journalism (I have made some modest contributions regarding geothermal energy) and is part of an ecosystem that is beginning to acquire political influence. The field owes much to economists such as the recently anointed Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr, who has argued that year-on-year enhancing of prosperity is not a law of nature; rather, it must be deliberately brought about. And so the Cowen crowd has tried to do exactly that: finding obstacles to progress — bureaucracy, Nimbyism, legalism and so on — and looking for ways society might circumvent them.

In recent years, the world has benefited from some amount of technological freshening up. Reusable rockets, large language models, self-driving cars, mRNA vaccines, cheap solar power: these are the kinds of innovations that excite technophiles. Yet China is pulling ahead, and the Gordian knots remain. At last weekend’s Progress Conference, in Berkeley, California, the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman — never one to knowingly understate the galaxy-shaping potential of his product — told Cowen that AI alone would not be able to solve the housing crisis. Even God-like intelligence, in other words, would struggle to get around Western planning regulations.

Altman’s presence at the conference betokens the intellectual clout that the progress scene enjoys in both technology and, increasingly, politics. Progress thought now comes in a variety of flavors, with each carrying different political valencies, and with each having different ramifications for industry and society alike. Usefully for its survival prospects, progress thought is syncretic: that is, able to attach itself to existing ideologies rather than needing to defeat them. It is worth paying attention to the question of which flavor is likeliest to win the day.

So far, one of them has achieved particular prominence. In May, two liberal journalists, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, published Abundance, a book that argues that their country has spent decades prioritizing process over progress. The book is now well thumbed among Democrat staffers, and its style of thinking was visible in the planning reforms signed by Gavin Newsom, governor of California, four months later. This is the state, of course, whose flagship high-speed rail project has produced an even more outrageous and ineffective boondogglethan HS2. In this context, where post-Seventies California has been entirely unequal to the task of building housing and infrastructure to accommodate its population boom, some regulatory streamlining might be no bad thing.

Whether the Democratic party is the optimal vessel for the progress movement, though, is debatable. Other political scenes seem more infused with vigor. Both the Right and non-mainstream Left are developing their own versions of abundance. In August, the political scientist Steven Teles made an early attempt at taxonomizing these new schools of abundance, which we can think of as flavors of progress. “As abundance becomes a larger part of our political discourse”, he predicted, these new varieties “will increasingly structure political identities”.

In the Teles taxonomy, the Left-most entry was “Red Plenty”. Zohran Mamdani, a socialist who beat the centrists to the Democratic nomination for the mayoralty of New York City, falls into this camp. Under Red Plenty, the state would lead economic development. Your power plants would be built with union labor, as would your housing. High rents would be solved by, er, banning landlords from charging high rents.

The “Red Plenty” approach will make economists roll their eyes, but it has the virtue of speaking to a more visceral part of human psychology than does the “Abundance” school. In socialist thought, there is an “us” and a “them”. Red Plenty offers to stick it to the landlords, to the wealthy, to the extractive capitalists. Abundance, in contrast, is rigorous and illuminating, but will not stir your passions. In classic liberal style, the book is carefully triangulated so as to avoid controversy. When Klein and Thompson discuss California, for instance, they make little acknowledgment of the fact that the state’s neglect of public transport might have something to do with the kind of people you encounter on it. (If you encounter anti-social behavior on the subway, as often happens in large American cities, then you will be less inclined to take the subway in future, and less willing for your taxpayer dollars to be spent on improvements to the subway.) Similarly, the authors are much more interested in the constraints on Californian housing supply than in recent decades’ gargantuan and immigration-driven increase in demand. Abundance, in their view, is universalist.

We can observe an intriguing contrast in the “American Dynamism” aesthetic, which valorizes modern American technological and architectural achievement. The coinage derives from an essay, published in 2022, by an investor who argued that America’s best hope is in “technologists building companies that support the national interest”. On X, accounts like “Based Americana” post appropriately bombastic images: Starship’s Raptor engines spewing blue flames, arrowhead silhouettes of B-2 bombers lowering in a hangar, the neoclassical magnificence of the long-lost Penn Station, American astronauts beholding the curve of the Earth, and Trump watching fighter jets soar over Mount Rushmore. The curation of these images amounts to propagandizing rather than policy prescription. But it speaks to something that the Abundance movement would rather avoid: chauvinism. By this I mean that, as with Red Plenty, American Dynamism is for a particular group of people. It has a brash patriotism to it. Universalists, by definition, cannot be chauvinists, but they might nevertheless note the intrigue stirred up by another of Teles’ categories, the provocatively named “Dark Abundance”.

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Within the Dark Abundance category are the think tankers and MAGA personnel who, like the Klein and Thompson crowd, want to reinvigorate American industry and improve American living standards, but, unlike the Klein and Thompson crowd, are inclined to do so via means that are more aggressive and, in their way, more chauvinistic. Dark Abundance, in the Teles taxonomy, is alarmed by the decline of America’s industrial base relative to China’s, and willing to take a Milei-esque chainsaw to the institutions it deems to be failing. (DOGE, in all its anti-bureaucratic fervor, is cited by Telos as an example.) Champions of Dark Abundance, whether or not they identify as such, are likely to be supportive of, or part of, the new generation of defense-adjacent tech firms — SpaceX, Anduril, other creators of Based Americana — and unsentimental about the use of fossil fuels en route to new forms of energy production. One might even classify Trump himself as a proponent of Dark Abundance. In an open letter to Michael Kratsios, who directs the White House’s Office of Science and Technology, Trump wrote in March that the US needed to “accelerate research and development, dismantle regulatory barriers, strengthen domestic supply chains and manufacturing, spur robust private sector investment, and advance American companies in global markets”. The US, wrote Trump, is in competition with other nations, and on a quest to become “greater than ever before”. Prosperity, in this view, is tied to security. “We will make America safer, healthier, and more prosperous than ever before.”

There is geopolitical safety, and there is day-to-day safety. Teles touches only glancingly on crime, but Dark Abundance was to take on new resonance in September. To the horror of the American Right, widely circulated CCTV footage showed a young Ukrainian woman, Iryna Zarutska, being fatally stabbed in the neck by a man who had been sitting behind her on a bus. “The Abundance crowd has no solution for this,” wrote Drew Pavlou, a high-profile Gen-Z political activist. Referring to the transformative, but severe, former prime minister of Singapore, Pavlou wrote: “This is why we need to combine Abundance with Lee Kuan Yew Thought: extremely harsh penalties for crime and public disorder.” Dark Abundance, in Pavlou’s subsequent framing, is not just about introducing gleaming subway carriages, but about ensuring those carriages are safe — even if to do so requires punitive measures.

Liberals, naturally, are scandalized by Dark Abundance. Jerusalem Demsas, the editor of a prominent new liberal journal, The Argument, wrote that Teles’ description “sounds like a not-so-charming euphemism for fascism”. The accusation is overblown, but Demsas was right to note that the conventional Abundance crowd is better on detail, is more collegiate, and can point to a growing body of patiently accumulated legislative achievements that the Dark Abundance crowd cannot.

Still, the Democrat flavor of abundance has little to say about the reality that some forms of technological progress are being held back by urban disorder. Every time an autonomous taxi in the Bay Area is vandalized, the technology becomes more expensive. It was announced last week that autonomous taxis will come to London next year, and we can quite reasonably hope that our own level of urban misbehavior, being lesser than the Bay Area’s, will leave these new taxis, defenseless as they are, generally unharmed. Other forms of robotics, such as pavement-trundling delivery robots, will be more vulnerable, especially in a city where phone theft and shoplifting have skyrocketed. Public goods depend on public order.

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It’s curious, then, that Dark Abundance is so-called. Should people who want lean and functional institutions or clean and safe public transport willingly identify as “dark”? One reason is that those ends require some unsavoriness: long prison sentences, intrusive surveillance, mass sackings, a devotion of our industrial energies to weaponry. This principle of unsavoriness applies even to construction, where to get rid of proceduralism is often to deny people the opportunity to object to a new housing estate or train line. The compromises are even more stark when it comes to crime.

But another answer is that the Right has been so often framed by the Left as morally wrong, as being on the dark side of a Manichean binary, that some of its disciples have developed some quasi-ironic contrarian relish for the role. There is a long and amusing history of Republicans professing support for, of all causes, the Galactic Empire in the Star Wars universe. In May, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, Scott Jennings, delivered a defense of Emperor Palpatine on CNN. “He took on an entrenched deep state [in] the Jedi Council… he wanted free and fair and reciprocal trade around the galaxy. [He] protected law and order.”

As another guest pointed out, Palpatine blew up an inhabited planet. But Jennings dug in. “Some could argue that it was warranted given their rebellious activities. I mean, he defended the Empire against unelected hippies and violent protesters.”

Which brings us back to Trump. “I think the Trump administration is less interested in sunshine and rainbows than, say, Ezra Klein is,” an attendee of this year’s Progress Conference told me. She reported that there was much more discussion of nationalism than there was at the same conference in 2024, which I attended, and plenty of pragmatic discussion of how to work with the MAGA White House. One success in this regard is Blake Scholl, whose company, Boom Supersonic, has built the first civilian supersonic jet since Concorde. Boom was the principal beneficiary of an executive order (EO), signed in June, that was designed to reduce the regulations holding back supersonic air travel. As the EO put it: “This order begins a historic national effort to reestablish the United States as the undisputed leader in high-speed aviation.”

In this case, then, chauvinism has propelled progress. A knot has been cut, and it might once again become possible to travel from London to New York within three hours. We can expect that Boom’s airliner, the Overture, will feature heavily in the next generation of “Based Americana” imagery.

So where will we be in another 50 years? If Dark Abundance wins the contest of ideas, and if the result is that supersonic airlines fill the skies above a wealthy, safe America, then its corner-cutting might appear to be justifiable. There remain many corners that Dark Abundance is unwilling to cut, many eggs that it hasn’t cracked into an omelet: eugenics, autocracy, wars of conquest, El Salvadorean prisons, and whatever it takes to wrench the birth rate back up. Each of those measures could, theoretically, enhance a country’s material progress; each requires significant moral compromise. Darker Abundance, as we might call it, would make Dark Abundance seem tame. The habit of corner-cutting is not always for the best, and nor is the habit of relishing the mantle of darkness.

Gaia, in Lovelock’s conception, is the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil we tread, the fruits we pluck from a tree. These are not discrete phenomena, according to the “Gaia hypothesis”, but different aspects of an interrelated whole. Mother Earth fills our lungs with air, our hands with food, and our river beds with water.

But what Gaia gives, warned Lovelock, she can take away. With “breathtaking insolence”, he wrote, humans have cracked open Gaia’s stores of carbon, hitherto buried so as to keep oxygen at its proper level, and burnt them as fuel. We have “usurped Gaia’s authority and thwarted her obligation to keep the planet fit for life”. Gaia, whose maternal patience lasts only so long, “now threatens us with the ultimate punishment of extinction”. With oceanic temperatures rising, predicted Lovelock, algae will falter in their production of dimethyl sulfide, a gas that helps clouds to form. With fewer clouds to shield us, the planet will become hotter and hotter. Perhaps a more apt Greek reference than Gaia is Medea — a mother who kills her own children.

Lovelock’s rather apocalyptic prognostications, published in 2006, might not be to everyone’s taste. Fossil fuels, though flawed, have helped lift billions of people out of poverty. Climate change, though devastating, is not remotely likely to be the death of humanity. Over the coming decades, we can expect longer droughts, hotter heatwaves, and more frequent and intense storms. As more data arrives, though, it seems that the worst-case forecasts, those that include runaway warming scenarios, look less likely than they did when Lovelock advanced the Gaia hypothesis.

Yet who among us has no weakness for animism? Last week, scientists informed conference-goers in Prague that the progressive melting of the world’s glaciers — which could lose as much as half their total mass by the year 2100 — will expose the long-buried volcanoes of Antarctica and elsewhere, sealed for millennia under gargantuan layers of ice. It is tempting to imagine that Mother Earth is preparing to punish her errant children, or that we dwarves, to invoke J.R.R. Tolkien, have indeed delved too greedily and too deep, awakening shadow and flame. Lovelock’s hypothesis did not posit Gaia as encompassing the magmatic fury of our planet’s interior, but it should have.

Two decades later, environmentalists still contend that, facing the vengeance of Mother Earth, we should simply submit to her will. Reduce, reuse, recycle — but do not re-engineer that dynamic physiological system. There are no workarounds, they argue; we must leave the planet as we found it.

This well-meaning submissiveness has amounted, in some cases, to a taboo against interfering with nature — a taboo that is now butting up against the hard reality of climate change. It is true that the most pessimistic and Lovelockian forecasts now seem less likely to be realized. But what we could think of as the medium-bad forecasts, in which we heat the planet by more than 2°C, are near-certain to be vindicated. The denialists, who have long insisted that climate change is not real, are as deluded as the environmentalists who insist it will eradicate humanity.

Our planet’s inarguable warming has led some iconoclasts — thick-skinned scientists and even a couple of audacious entrepreneurs — to argue that we should break the taboo against meddling. It is past time, in this view, that we rejected the authority of Mother Earth.

There is one particular act of meddling that will, over the coming years, prompt particular acrimony and vituperation. The act is “stratospheric aerosol injection”, by which we release a balloon filled with sulfur dioxide, a gas whose particles are reflective. The balloon, if it also contains helium, will rise — and when it pops, it will scatter those reflective particles. If the balloon, by that point, has soared above the clouds and into the upper atmosphere, then those particles will reflect the Sun’s brilliant white light back into space. And for every photon deflected back into the darkness, the Earth forgoes a quantum of warmth. Stratospheric aerosol injection, therefore, might seem to be a useful method for a species that is coming to regret its overheating of its home. Tiny amounts of sulfur dioxide can offset the heating effect of one’s annual carbon footprint. A sustained, large-scale operation, the argument goes, could do the same for humanity.

Environmentalists, who might putatively be in favor of the mitigation of global warming, call the method dangerous and its practitioners charlatans. Understandably, they see such schemes as entailing a failure to address the root causes of global warming, and a failure to address related problems such as air pollution. They also warn that the practice could change weather patterns and, if things go very badly, cause acid rain. More profoundly, many people feel intuitively that planetary systems should be sacrosanct, that to meddle with them would be tantamount to “playing God”.

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How modernity erupted from a volcano

By Paul Lay

Stratospheric aerosol injection is therefore the forbidden fruit in the garden of climate intervention. So far, only a very small number of people have dabbled in this dark art. Among them are the two co-founders of a start-up, Make Sunsets, that sends up balloons on behalf of customers. “We should not be the ones doing this!”, one of the start-up’s two founders told me last year, when I was writing a book on humanity’s efforts to avoid catastrophe. Make Sunsets’ operation resembles some of the more chaotic scenes from the TV series Breaking Bad: two rascals taking an RV to the wilderness in order to cook up something that many observers would view as utterly reprehensible. 

But it is not just these two climate cowboys who are interested in the dark arts. The US government, for instance, has funded research into solar geoengineering, which encompasses methods such as making clouds more reflective. (Since then, the US Environmental Protection Agency has let it be known that it is willing to crush the Make Sunsets operation if it gets much bigger.) ARIA, which is a British government agency best thought of as a moonshot factory, has its own solar geoengineering programme, one that was derided in The Guardian as a “dangerous distraction from the work that needs to be done to achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions”. Leftist environmentalists typically prefer degrowth, irrespective of the damage it would do to global prosperity, to technical fixes.

Yet, as Britain is discovering, the race to Net Zero is a painful hobble. The project depends on political capital that elites are burning unsustainably fast. Voters are concerned about the climate, but they are also concerned about high energy costs and the economic stagnation that these high energy costs have contributed to. Given these circumstances, there is a good chance that, faced with an inexorably heating planet, some governments will — within a few years, and for better or worse — attempt to mount a serious solar geoengineering operation.

The existing operations, small and exploratory programmes that they are, do not amount to our species playing God. But decades of burning fossil fuels amounts, in its own way, to geoengineering. As a futurist scientist, Anders Sandberg, once said to me of the climate: “If you break it, you bought it.” 

But the purchase comes with catches, of which one is the increasing public paranoia about weather intervention. When heavy rainfall caused lethal flooding in Texas this month, conspiracy theorists blamed foreign interference and vandalized weather monitoring equipment. Geoengineering is a Pandora’s box: not only environmentally, but also socio-politically.

Yet some scientists dream of even more muscular interventions. Should Gaia punish us by unsealing a horde of volcanoes, we will have even more reason to learn to tame their kind. We must learn, now or later, to prevent the kind of mega-eruptions that, at several times in the Earth’s history, have caused massive loss of life worldwide. Around 74,000 years ago, for instance, the eruption of the Toba supervolcano, in what is now Indonesia, caused so much atmospheric smog — as stratospheric aerosol injection would, but involving many orders of magnitude more material — that it has been accused of wiping out almost every living human. Volcanic winter, as this phenomenon is called, kills first the plants that can no longer photosynthesize, and then the animals that can no longer eat the plants.

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The lethality of the Toba eruption has been contested, but we can say with confidence that severe volcanic events, those that come around every 50,000 to 100,000 years, would result in a world much like the one that followed the catastrophic arrival of Chicxulub, the asteroid that eradicated the dinosaurs. Relatively few of them would have been killed by the collision. Such was the amount of matter lofted into the atmosphere that most of them would have perished in the gloom that followed. The fossil record tells an eerie tale of an abundant planet transformed into one that was cold, dank and ruled by fungi.

It was with these events in mind that, 10 years ago, some researchers at the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggested it might be possible to defuse a supervolcano. We would do so by extracting geothermal heat from it for millennia, thus wicking away the energy that would otherwise have found expression in an eruption. The paper remains a source of exasperation for geologists with even the most moderate streak of realism. The engineering challenge, I was told in 2024 by a beleaguered employee of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, is “just beyond description”: centuries of work, in very dangerous conditions, on a scale far larger than anything ever attempted in geothermal engineering.

Sandberg, the futurist who made the quip about humanity having to buy the climate, is one of the few scientists to have made a serious case for volcano geoengineering. Super-eruptions occur only very infrequently, but they occur all the same. In a paper published in 2023, Sandberg and his two co-authors gently point out that there are precedents for directly manipulating natural hazards, be they avalanches, forest fires, floods, landslides, or even, as of 2022, asteroids. They also refer to the handful of attempts in the 20th century to redirect dangerous flows of lava. These redirections were well-intentioned, although there were some who proposed to use volcanoes offensively. Reginald Purbrick, a wartime British MP, was keen on the idea of bombing Vesuvius so as to trigger an eruption. Similarly, it was suggested to President Roosevelt that the same might be done to Mount Fuji in order to “convince the mass of Japanese that their gods were angry with them”. Those dangerous schemes were never realized, but it is notable that they were even mooted. Perhaps it would not be wholly for the best if humanity became better able to direct the behavior of volcanoes.

Lovelock, who died in 2022, was wrong about the character of Gaia. In some ways, as he identified, our world is exquisitely suitable for us. In other ways, though, it is irrevocably hostile. It is comforting to imagine that we are a fetus in the womb of Mother Earth, but the reality is harsher.

Addressing that harshness will create new and complex problems. Stratospheric aerosol injection, like cloud-seeding, will provoke rancor and paranoia. The engineering challenges will be much less arduous than the problem of fairly coordinating across different countries and interest groups. It is much likelier that geoengineering, of the climate and beyond, is undertaken without unanimous global consent than with it. Such projects will therefore violate two further taboos: one being democratic consent, the other being the principle that life-saving interventions must “first, do no harm”. These taboos should not be lightly broken. It is quite possible that, in a quest to avert a bigger eruption, we will incur smaller eruptions, affecting people who never agreed to the project.

For now, the idea of volcano geoengineering is fanciful. And so too is the idea of an imminent supervolcano eruption. But, in the long term, these events could pose a direr threat than climate change. One need only to consider a dinosaur fossil to be reminded of the peril of a darkened planet. It is true that Gaia is a beneficent Mother Earth as well as a callous Medea. But a child is only a child for so long.

But watch him with Jensen Huang, as I did recently, and you will observe an unusual dynamic. The Nvidia chief executive acts not just as Macron’s peer, but even, in brief glimpses, his superior. When the two men were on stage together at a tech conference in Paris, there was a telling moment almost lost in an animated conversation. Huang, wearing his usual leather jacket and t-shirt pairing, talked over the President.

It was as if Huang were a statesman of slightly senior rank, an idea that seems less illusory with every year of Nvidia dominance. Arthur Mensch, the 31-year-old chief executive of Europe’s leading frontier AI company, Mistral, sat on the fringe of the conversation. Quiet, well-dressed, and intermittently talked up by Macron, he gave a stronger impression than Huang of being the President’s junior.

Huang’s assuredness is justified. Macron is keenly aware of the predictions that advanced AI will usher in a period of wealth creation unlike any the modern world has seen. He is also aware that with creations of wealth come redistributions of power. The French believe that if they are to be on the right side of these developments, they will need homegrown companies such as Mistral to compete with giants like OpenAI. And if Mistral is to compete, then it will need the Élysée to secure the physical hardware on which the company’s computation will take place and its data transferred.

It is Nvidia, of course, which sells that hardware: the silicon chips at the heart of this revolution. Imagine that, at the dawn of the fossil fuel era, there was a single company that was central to the piping and other infrastructure required to transfer oil, gas and coal and to burn them. Sure, Google and Amazon have their own serviceable chips; other companies are trying to develop their own. But Nvidia occupies a dominant position.

It is no wonder, therefore, that the California-based company has the second-highest market cap of any company in the world. And it is no wonder that Macron has championed Mensch and has helped broker a deal between Nvidia and parties including Mistral. As Macron said: “This is our fight for sovereignty, for strategic autonomy, which is to say: we want to keep that.”

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The deal will ensure that Mistral is one of the beneficiaries of Nvidia’s Blackwell platform: the new generation of microchips on which high-level computation can take place. This will allow Mistral to handle the duties that will be increasingly outsourced to it by the French state: bureaucratic, logistical, even military. Blackwell will also be the training ground for forthcoming iterations of Mistral’s large language models. Sure, the Élysée could contract an American company — OpenAI has begun hawking its services to entire countries — but that would risk France’s independence. Such a deal could ultimately be the equivalent of filling a civil service with foreign nationals who could be recalled without warning.

Even using ChatGPT puts French consumers downstream of decisions made by American developers. It was American developers, famously, who were responsible for the Gemini model that gave the impression that Vikings and Nazis alike were black. That kind of overbearing cultural engineering, though accidental and swiftly retracted, is a poor fit for a country that has a heavy-handed cultural programme of its own. Take the Académie Française, whose role of language custodianship — did I say “role” again? I meant rôle — has no equivalent in the Anglophone world.

Sovereign AI, then, makes philosophical and pragmatic sense for a country that retains a defiant sense of selfhood. And as the data fed to AIs becomes increasingly voluminous and intimate, even as the AIs are given more comprehensive decision-making power in realms from utilities to the military, the task of implementing sovereign AI becomes ever-more urgent.

But is it really sovereign? There is an obvious irony in buying one’s sovereignty from an American company. Neither Macron nor Huang nor Mensch acknowledged that on stage. But the facts are plain: Donald Trump could, with a single executive order, prevent Nvidia from exporting chips even to Western allies such as Britain, France and South Korea. The world’s most powerful chips, those used within Nvidia equipment, are the product of near-superhuman manufacturing whose complexity and intricacy are unsurpassed beyond Taiwanese shores. Blackwell models include 208 billion transistors, each of which is smaller than a viral particle and etched by lasers with nanometre-scale precision. This is some of the most technically demanding engineering on the planet.

Very few countries, even with sustained national effort, could emulate the performance of those GPUs with an in-house substitute. So far, only China comes close. And the US and China are the only two countries that can already claim to be anywhere near AI sovereignty, developing both hardware and software either on their own shores or via domestically headquartered companies such as Nvidia. True AI sovereignty, for almost every other country, is therefore something approaching a mirage — at least within the current technological paradigm.

The same is true, though, of almost any given technology. Prosperity depends on trade; trade depends on interdependence. The pipework of AI, so to speak, happens to be accessible only via an unusually small number of vendors. But the impracticability of perfect sovereign AI does not mean that Macron and his peers should not strive for it. There are relatively few vendors of oil and gas, and total energy independence is very difficult, but it is still worth aiming for. Partial dependence is much more desirable than total dependence.

There remains the uncomfortable question of what will become of the countries that fail to secure any meaningful kind of AI sovereignty. They are likely to outsource some amount of decision-making to foreign tech companies, and this decision-making will be inflected by someone else’s values. The decision-making would be based on data that might be held in foreign servers. One can imagine President Donald Trump Jr, a couple of election cycles hence, demanding access to a third-world country’s cobalt mines, threatening to turn off this country’s access to its own data. More subtly, a leading power might use other levers: limiting, for instance, a rival’s speed of access to the latest AI models. No less significantly for such a country, its selfhood will inevitably be eroded if it is governed by algorithmic values that are not quite its own. As Nathan Beniach, an investor and the author of the “State of AI” report, tells me: “For countries that opt out of building strategic AI infrastructure, the risk isn’t immediate subjugation but progressive loss of agency, what I’ve called a form of AI colonialism. These nations will increasingly find their economies, healthcare systems, security apparatus, and political discourse shaped by foreign models they neither control nor fully understand.”

The classical nation-state model, says Benaich, will struggle to adapt to these conditions. What emerges from the “sovereign AI” sales pitch, he suggests, is “a kind of neo-mercantilist compute empire, whereby Nvidia occupies the position of upstream monopolist, extracting rents across multiple national industrial strategies”.

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Along the way, Huang, who is already worth $93 billion, will become even wealthier. Nvidia, whose stock price jumped on the day of the Paris event, is on course to become even more dominant than it is already; Apple and Microsoft will have to innovate rapidly in order to keep up. Anyone fearing an eternal monopoly, though, should note the rapid outmoding of the Google search engine, once seen as unassailable, by today’s youthful cadre of large language models. It is conceivable that, even without the advantage of Chinese IP theft, someone will make cheaper versions of Nvidia hardware.

And so the scramble for digital sovereignty begins. Last week, the British government called for “high-ambition researchers” to come up with uses for its new supercomputer, combining AI with robotics, biosciences, materials discovery and national security. Meanwhile, the President of South Korea has announced a $735-billion investment plan that will keep the country’s AI South Korean, and has been harvesting leading tech executives to steward the project.

Richer and more assertive countries, such as France, will retain some level of independence, even if intelligence, power and wealth begin to concentrate more intensely than they do already. Britain has catching-up to do; having allowed Google, as it was then, to buy DeepMind, we have no home-grown frontier AI company to rival Mistral.

If the doomers are correct, the ongoing concentration of intelligence and power is freighted with danger. The big fish will get bigger, the small fish will get smaller, and Starmer and Macron have a limited amount of time in which to find their countries’ place in this precipitous new hierarchy.

The CCP is now working on an even larger dam, one that will tame the mighty Yarlung Tsangpo, Tibet’s longest river. This new edifice will generate three times the hydroelectric power of the Three Gorges Dam. Depending on the geographical provenance of its building materials, the new dam will probably add another few microseconds to each day on Earth.

Microseconds, being a millionth of a second, are imperceptible, but China’s march into the future is becoming impossible to ignore. This is a country whose forays into gigantism include the world’s biggest building, longest bridge, largest air terminal and — to its deep shame, one imagines — third-largest skyscraper. Long derided as a manufacturer merely of low-quality, imitative goods, China is threatening to lead the world in anti-aircraft drone swarms, humanoid robots, gun-toting robo-dogs, hypersonic fighter jets, and maglev hyperloops that will, sooner or later, make China’s existing network of high-speed trains look as rusty and decrepit as its antediluvian counterparts in Britain.

The comparison, though unflattering, is instructive. In cost, at least, Britain’s second-ever high-speed rail project — the first was the Eurostar — matched China’s flair for gigantism. But it was reduced in scope, piece by piece, until it became a connection merely between Birmingham and the suburbs of London. While Britain made a eunuch of its grandest infrastructure project, failing to build a late-20th century iteration of a technology we invented in the 19th, the Chinese were pioneering, in the form of the maglev hyperloop, a technology we might not emulate until the 22nd.

In many respects, China is outperforming even the United States. As the winds of change howl, look for taut windsocks. We can see one in the form of the Techno-Industrial Playbook, the product of a pan-institutional banding-together of dozens of American think-tankers. Many of these think-tankers, over the course of their careers, have been principally concerned with economic growth. But the playbook is something more muscular: a plan for reinvigorated American technological strength, a plan via which the country can reinvigorate its industrial base, attract the world’s top talent, and take control of important resources such as rare earth minerals. It is a sign of changing times and, to use a well-worn phrase, interesting times.

As for Britain, there has been talk in this publication and elsewhere of Anglofuturism: a neo-Gaullist project via which the country might be propelled into a future that, though founded on what is now frontier technology, feels like home. But if any country is currently and coherently reifying such a vision, it is China. To use the coinage of the artist Lawrence Lek, a Londoner of Malaysian-Chinese extraction, we can call this vision Sinofuturism.

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Any attempt to understand Sinofuturism must begin with the pit out of which China has bootstrapped itself. China’s “Century of Humiliation” began with the mass opium addiction fomented by the East India Company in the 1830s and continued with the resultant Opium Wars. China’s defeat by the British was followed by defeat by Japan and the attempted carving-up of the country by a greedy host of foreign powers. This wretched period finally ended, according to the Chinese telling, with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, following a 22-year civil war, in 1949. Much misery lay yet in store: Mao alone is believed to have been responsible for 65 million deaths, through both mass murder and the famine that resulted from the “Great Leap Forward”.

Britain and America, in living memory and beyond, have been spared the agonies of famine and state-sanctioned mass murder. Those of us native to the postwar West are probably incapable of fully understanding the effect on the Chinese psyche of those traumas and humiliations. But we do know that China yearns to be the best, to be the biggest, to command respect, and to be invulnerable both to rival powers and to nature itself.

It is in this respect, in that domineering attitude to nature, that we can see one of the most significant differences between China and the Anglosphere. China, says Thomas White, a sinologist at King’s College London, sees nature as a resource, as something to be exploited and engineered. “There is a faith in the ability of humans to intervene in ecological processes in order to improve them, rather than a sense that human impact is inevitably detrimental.”

We can see traces of this attitude in China’s ecology-wrecking dams, its weather-altering geoengineering and its desert-defying Great Green Wall. In these endeavours there is an inheritance from the millennia-old Chinese dream of taming floods. It was a dream realized by the legendary engineer, Da Yu, whose labors secured him emperorship of the Xia Dynasty. Five-thousand years after Yu’s supposed existence, the Chinese press paid Jiang Zemin, the engineer-turned-president who oversaw the building of the Three Gorges Dam, the profound compliment of calling him “the new Da Yu”. (If you continue to doubt the significance of this kind of engineering to Chinese governing, note that the Chinese word for politics — 政治 — contains an ideogrammatic element denoting “water management”.)

Most of China’s great nature-defying projects would be out of place in the West. To return to the debacle of HS2, one imagines that the Chinese were mystified to learn that Brits spent £100 million to build a shed for the benefit of rare bats. Perhaps they are also mystified by our willingness to waylay large infrastructure projects on account of individuals who might be bothered by noise or are unwilling to be moved. In contrast, the building of the Three Gorges Dam entailed the displacement of at least 1.4 million people.

This disregard for the human is another foundational difference. Whether you ascribe it to collectivism, Confucianism or a post-traumatic invulnerability to complacency, Sinofuturism is, by and large, disinclined to make way for the individual. It is this illiberal tendency, to a Western eye, that fosters some of the most appalling examples of the CCP’s inhumanity: the political imprisonments, the constant surveillance, the abuse of animals, the fearful neighbors, the indentured Uyghurs. China’s dominance of global manufacturing, even on behalf of companies headquartered in the West, is at least partly dependent on forced labor. Sinofuturism has involved the pulling of levers that Westerners would be unwilling to touch.

Cheap labor, too, has been a tremendous asset to Chinese manufacturing — as has rampant IP theft and the cornering, via dealmaking in the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere, of the entire industrial supply chain. Thanks to these factors and others, China has clawed itself back to the technological frontier. In the ninth century, Chinese monks discovered gunpowder; in the 21st, we learned this April, Chinese engineers have successfully tested a non-nuclear hydrogen bomb, unleashing an intense fireball without needing to use radioactive material. But more important than any particular new technology, says William Matthews, of Chatham House, is China’s mastery of the production of technology. “The real potential China has technologically is that, because it’s got such enormous manufacturing capacity, it has the potential to implement AI systems that are designed for logistics optimization and supply chain optimization.” Faster and more efficient manufacturing allows China to spam out electric vehicles and other technologies that the CCP has judged in advance to be worth dominating.

Doing all this automatically — replacing all that cheap labor with robot arms and so on — is a project currently underway, for China, like the West, faces the civilizational challenge of a tumbling birth rate. The West has tried to cheaply address the problem by importing millions of migrants, thus storing up further problems while impeding (and in some cases retarding) the development of automation. China’s program of automation looks the better bet.

And the CCP’s goal, says Matthews, is to lead the way not only in robotics, but in other emerging technologies, such as AI and quantum computing. “It aims to use these as a basis for effecting what amounts to a qualitative shift in economic power, similar to the original Industrial Revolution, that will lead China to a position where actually economically, at the national level, it outcompetes the United States.”

America remains the wealthier country, and the home, as Elon Musk has pointed out with regard to Sinofuturism, of the hyper-futurist project that is Starship. But China is growing in civilizational confidence, the effects of which are visible not only in its space program, which is aiming to build the first moon base, but in its architecture. It is telling, in this respect, that Xi Jinping has banned “oversized and xenocentric” buildings, of which the “big pants” skyscraper, which resembles a pair of trousers, is a notorious example. The result of the edict is that China’s multiplying cityscapes will no longer be the plaything of experimental Western modernists. Sinofuturism’s larger infrastructure, writ in monumental concrete, will retain its herculean Maoist drabness. But pre-revolutionary design tropes, such as courtyards and the use of feng shui principles, are becoming more visible in the country’s newer building projects.

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What, though, is the end-state of Sinofuturism? To the extent that China remains a communist state rather than an autocracy sui generis, it is not of the proselytizing variety. The USSR wanted to spread Communism around the world; the leading members of the CCP, according to Matthews, have little interest in such evangelism. “Their ideological position is one that’s based on the idea of distinctive civilizations with their own value histories. There’s a desire to displace the United States, but that, I think, is with a view to minimizing external interference.” There is little evidence that Xi wants the Chinese flag to flutter over Western capitals, though an annexation of Taiwan might make us reconsider that assumption. As does the Chinese march through our industry, property and universities.

And as America might discover in a war over Taiwan, hegemons tend not to come in pairs. The Thucydides trap is well-documented, and one emerging technology in particular might be the key to domination. It is not an uncommon view among AI researchers that the first country to develop artificial superintelligence will secure for themselves an indefinite global hegemony. This country’s sovereign AI, according to certain prognostications, will outthink its opponents at lightning speed, rendering those opponents harmless. Matthews envisages a slower takeoff of AI capability, and a more enduring bifurcation between American and Chinese systems. But the prospect of Chinese domination of AI, and of a world shaped by the CCP’s values above all others, ought to focus the mind.

There is much to deplore about modern China. But the West might, at the same time, examine its confidence and ambition. If it is to be the values of the Anglosphere, rather than those of the CCP, that define the next centuries, then we ought, pragmatically, to consider how it is that China has revitalized itself so effectively. We should not wish for a government that would displace 1.4 million people to build a dam, but nor should we wish for a government that allows individual Nimbys to block infrastructure that would benefit tens of millions. The Victorians had more centralized planning power than we do, and the result is that we still skulk around in the structures they left us. More fundamentally, they wanted to build things that would last. We need to rediscover those long-dormant muscle fibers.

Democracies are very good at industrial innovation, but less good at long-term industrial planning. China’s recent progress in AI is the fruit of a plan set down in 2017. I’m told that, a little later, the British government was warned by experts that it had a brief window in which to corner a new technology called a large language model. The government acknowledged the opportunity but did not act on it. Training runs multiplied in cost and Britain no longer has the option of getting ahead. A reinvigorated West, along the lines of the one envisaged in the Playbook, will need to relearn how to design, and stick to, far-sighted industrial plans.

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That applies in particular to trade. As America’s allies are currently discovering, erraticism is not an attractive feature in a customer. And much of the developing world sees China, instead, as a more worthwhile partner, with the result that China has secured reliable supplies of every important mineral. But there are many downsides to the handing of economic dominance to China, which is, at best, indifferent to the liberal internationalism that has brought such prosperity to the world. To this effect, the economist Noah Smith writes that, in comparison to postwar America, a dominant China “will be less interested in creating freedom of the seas for other nations, and more narrowly concerned with protecting its own trade… [And] for all the sneers directed at America’s self-appointed role of ‘world police’, it was more willing to stand up to regional conquerors than China has proven so far.” Embrace the Belt and Road Initiative in haste; repent at leisure.

The irony is that China is, in certain intellectual respects, a child of the West. In a glib sense, that is to be expected of such a prolific thief of IP, but the phenomenon goes much deeper. As White observes, the Chinese faith in human reason and progress, and in humanity’s ability to triumph over nature, have a “direct lineage to the Enlightenment”. And Marxism, of course, with all its ideas about the progression of history through certain stages, is itself a Western invention.

In every Chinese reach for greatness, then, one can discern at least a vestige of what we can think of as civilizational anxiety of influence. It is an anxiety that is borne not only of that uneasy intellectual inheritance, but of the long and torturous Century of Humiliation. And it is an anxiety that, should things continue in the present vein, will persist for much longer than the primacy of the West. As if suffering from sleep paralysis, we are becoming aware of our sclerosis, but are not yet able to arrest it. Our political classes are responding to this dangerous new world with a combination of clumsiness and naivety. What the moment requires of the West, though, is a project of revival — one that is pragmatic enough to analyze what is effective about Sinofuturism, but bold and self-confident enough to surpass it.