Show Notes
The liberal world order was built for a different era — more centralized, more hierarchical, more predictable. In the 21st century, power has gone fluid. It flows through supply chains and satellites, networks and platforms, alliances that shift issue by issue.
In this episode, policy thinker Anne-Marie Slaughter joins Nathan Gardels to map a world no longer defined by blocs, but by webs. From climate cooperation to civilizational conflict, from multipolar diplomacy to local democratic renewal, they explore what comes after the end of the nation-state’s monopoly on the future.
More from Futurology
Hypocrisy, the old line goes, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. For eighty years, the powerful at least bothered to pay it, citing human rights, national security, and democracy as reasons for starting wars and undercutting liberties. Now the veneers have been stripped, and the next generation is not accepting business as usual.
Machines are starting to act like humans. Does that mean they’re conscious? The problem is we haven’t been able to prove how or why humans are conscious yet either. So why would we be able to offer any answers about AI?
Democracy counts people, not plants. Humans are only a sliver of life on this planet, but today, we're the only ones who get a vote. What if we gave rights to rivers and standing to trees?
Somewhere around the Enlightenment we decided that thinking was what made us human. We built our schools, careers, and sense of worth at the altar of intelligence. Now machines are passing us on that rubric, which leaves two possibilities: we were replaceable all along, or we picked the wrong standard to live by.
Relying on machines to coordinate our lives was just one step toward decentering humanity’s role in the world. Flights, banking, trade, food production... But as we start merging our actual decision-making with digital entities, exactly which pieces of humanity are we leaving behind? And how might we bring those pieces back?