Draft Chapters
Working text and evolving structure. Expect edits.
Chapter 01 — After Abundance
When cognition is cheap and everywhere, value migrates to the scarce: energy, infrastructure, permission layers, and time. This chapter frames the shift from labor economics to energy economics.
Draft excerpt: The moment intelligence becomes a commodity, it ceases to be the bottleneck. Systems that transform energy into real‑world control become the dominant economic engines. The winners are not those who think, but those who can deploy. The robotics stack is starting to consolidate around simulation + “world model” tooling (e.g., NVIDIA’s Isaac/Cosmos/GR00T announcements at GTC 2026), which is basically the software bridge from cheap cognition → physical throughput: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-and-global-robotics-leaders-take-physical-ai-to-the-real-world
Chapter 02 — Energy as Capital
Energy becomes the primary store of value: cheap energy means cheaper everything. The economics of grids, storage, and baseload power become the new capital stack.
Draft excerpt: In the post‑AGI economy, energy is not a cost line—it’s the denominator of all production. Control of generation, storage, and conversion defines sovereignty. Near-term, the system still reaches for whatever scales fastest (often natural gas), even as it builds the cleaner stack. EIA data underscores the transitional reality: U.S. marketed natural gas production hit a record 118.5 Bcf/d in 2025, coal logistics keep getting optimized (average inflation-adjusted coal transport cost fell to $17.55/ton in 2024), and even the *measurement* of supply can shift as agencies refine play definitions (EIA’s March 2026 update netted +0.2 million b/d tight oil and +0.8 Bcf/d shale gas for 2025 in the Permian): https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67345 ; https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67346 ; https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67364
Chapter 03 — Infrastructure Sovereignty
Factories, compute, logistics, and grids are the new borders. Nations and firms compete over physical throughput, not just capital.
Draft excerpt: The “cloud” is a physical system. Compute needs power, land, cooling, and supply chains. EIA notes U.S. electricity demand grew about 1.7% annually from 2020–2025 after more than a decade of little change, with data centers a key driver: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67344. When load grows faster than new capacity and interconnection, grids lean on existing dispatchables first—turning energy security and permitting into the real moat. And the footprint expands beyond hyperscale campuses: NVIDIA’s GTC 2026 framing of telecom-built “AI grids” treats inference capacity as a geographically distributed network asset, which rhymes with the book’s thesis that infrastructure sovereignty includes network topology, not just generation and land: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/telecom-ai-grids-inference/