By john For 300 years, the international system assumed that the primary currency of power was capital. States competed to accumulate it, weaponize it, manipulate Pokemon787 login its flows, and use it to steer industrial and military advantage. AI ends this paradigm. When cognition at scale becomes artificially abundant, the bottleneck is no longer money — it is metaphysical stability. Meaning becomes the final scarce resource that cannot be automated, cannot be mass-produced, cannot be replaced by synthetic cognition. Meaning becomes the final premium asset class of power. The world is about to enter its first era where the most valuable sovereign capability is narratology — the ability to produce coherent, durable, future motivating meaning systems that restore existential orientation to populations.
Money has historically been used to engineer meaning. But money cannot substitute meaning when the meaning substrate collapses. You cannot buy identity continuity. You cannot stimulate existential stability with fiscal stimulus packages. You cannot quantitatively ease purpose. The world is discovering this in real-time: people are not burning out because of capital scarcity — they are burning out because of spiritual famine. AI accelerates this famine by collapsing all fixed reference points faster than biology can emotionally digest. Economic power will not be able to successfully convert into political legitimacy unless it is backed by meaning power.
This changes national strategy calculus. Superpowers will now have to invest in moral architecture design, narrative manufacturing, symbolic coherence engineering, and meaning sovereignty the same way they invested in aircraft carriers and nuclear deterrence. Middle powers will differentiate not through military modernization alone — but through civilizational metaphysical resilience capacity. Small states that historically were irrelevant might become central if they are meaning exporters. The Global South has massive latent advantage here because their cultural memory continuity is stronger than the West’s post enlightenment secular abstraction.
The shift underway is civilization scale. Meaning supply is going to be a competitive economic domain like semiconductor supply, rare earths, uranium, or oil. Except even more decisive — because this resource underwrites society itself. AI makes capital cheap. AI makes cognition cheap. AI makes productivity cheap. But meaning cannot be mass manufactured. The states that can reliably produce it will own the world. This is the final economic frontier — and the geopolitical pivot of the AI century.