Is A Great War Inevitable?

War may be an accident, but great war is an alignment; and I feel all macro and micro trends have aligned to create a rupture.

In the past couple of weeks, I've had numerous conversations and delivered assessments in NYC, DC and SF on this, so I decided to make it public here.

Over the past 500 years, we moved from agrarian economies to industrialisation, which disrupted societies by mobilising mass labour and creating a lot more jobs than the world previously experienced. The machine didn't entirely replace the human, it created a new economy and prosperity that was dependant on the human working the machine.

But that new economy was really a product of European colonisation of rest of the world. It created demand, and it provided supply; some populations got liberated, while others got enslaved. Much of our modern social infrastructure that we know of including universities, think tanks, jobs, and life in general is really an outcome of and structured around this industrialisation led corporatisation of the world.

But here is the trouble in 2025.

With AI, the disruption is the opposite, it’s de-mobilising labour and eliminating jobs, even the well paid cognitive jobs like think tanks and academic ones are gone. Once the demand and supply frameworks collapse, the concepts of society (especially the Western one) we have come to take for granted is also going to crash with it.

In our short human history, we’ve never seen this before. But if I were to assess: when labour frees up, as in the days of empires, people often filled the ranks of armies, militias, or extremist groups. There is likely going to be a recolonisation not for labor, though, but for critical minerals, data and other resources needed to engine AI led new economic growth.

But here is an even bigger problem: "Short-termism"

This shift, from labour-intensive industrialisation to labour-less AI, is a dangerously sensitive moment and no state or global leadership is prepared for it. Instead, the entire policy and business leadership around the world has gone into a 'short-term' play responding day to day and week to week squabbling over non issues while hoping that the elephant in the room will somehow vanish on its own.

Civil wars, unrest, even state wars appear inevitable if I go by the data. What will come out of it, is yet to be seen but one thing is for sure; it's already underway.