Question

Technology as Power: Acceleration, Divergence, and the Reconfiguration of Agency

A new open-access KSCCN paper argues that the widening gap between the AI frontier and everyone else is not a temporary lag but the surface of a deeper shift: technology is becoming the primary substrate of power.

What the paper does

• Revisits 2021 diagnoses of relocated collusion, concentration of access and protocol-bounded agency, and shows they carried over from blockchain to centralised foundation models and sovereign compute
• Sets out a multi-domain trajectory (paradigm shift 2026–2027, AGI on or before 2030, biological interfacing around 2035, new energy mechanisms by 2040, state-form obsolescence 2031–2035)
• Tests it against laboratory timelines, forecasting aggregates, Perpetual Five-Year Technology (PFYT) theory and governance literature, noting where it runs ahead of consensus
• Adds World Bank data: global internet use rose from 28.4% (2010) to 73.6% (2025), and only 19 of 200 economies exceeded one trillion dollars of GDP in 2024

Why it matters for builders: when baselines shift in months, systems and the institutions that oversee them must be designed for continuous reconfiguration (fluid, adaptive, agentic and agile), or concentration of design and access rights simply migrates to each new layer.

Read the paper:

• Zenodo (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23845136
• Academia: https://www.academia.edu/179991342/Technology_as_Power_Acceleration_Divergence_and_the_Reconfiguration_of_Agency

KSCCN