The Intelligence Delta

Palazzo Lateranense, the twenty-fifth of May. I am on a panel with James Muller, who co-founded International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War — the organisation that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 — and with a Chinese scholar of classical culture. The question put to us is about inequality.

I begin where anyone would begin in that building. The Church has spent more than a century on inequality: the dignity of work, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor. It is the most sustained body of thought on the subject that any institution has produced. I say so, and I mean it.

And then, somewhere in the middle of my own sentence, I stop. Because I realise that the word I have just used with such confidence no longer covers the thing I have spent the last two years watching.

We spent the twentieth century measuring inequality in wealth. We are going to spend the twenty-first measuring it in something else.

Here is the shortest way I can put it. Tokens are the currency of artificial intelligence. If your country does not have tokens — if it does not have the compute, the energy, the models and the capital to generate them at scale — then in the terms that will matter, it does not have a GDP. Not a small one. Not a lagging one. It has a number that has stopped measuring the thing everyone assumes it measures.

That sounds like rhetoric. It is arithmetic.

Wealth inequality was a distribution problem inside a shared system of production. Two countries made things the same way; one made more of them. You could argue about trade, about tariffs, about aid, about the terms on which the surplus was divided, and the argument was coherent because the underlying activity was comparable.

Intelligence inequality is not that. It is a difference in the production function itself. If one economy operates several times more efficiently because it has embedded machine cognition into how it decides, designs, procures and manufactures, then comparing its output to its neighbour's is not comparing two runners. It is comparing a runner to a vehicle. The unit of measurement quietly stops working, and the number on the page keeps being reported as though it still does.

And it compounds. Compute buys capability. Capability buys revenue. Revenue buys compute. The loop closes, and each turn of it widens the gap by more than the last. Look at what is being committed: a scale of investment in the United States over a single year that the entire European Union does not approach, that Canada does not approach by an order of magnitude. The training economics make it worse — most of the cost of building a frontier system is compute, and the compute is somewhere else. For every dollar of value created, the great majority leaves.

The Holy See has already conceded the measurement point, more directly than most finance ministries have. Magnifica Humanitas says outright that development metrics tied to GDP have, for more than eighty years, "almost systematically neglect[ed] aspects essential to the overall wellbeing of people and the environment," and that complementary parameters are now crucial. The encyclical is more precise still about the illusion underneath the optimism: "To think that new technologies will automatically benefit everyone is to ignore the evidence."

Now the objection, which is a good one and deserves better than a dismissal.

Efficiency is a virtue. It is the mechanism by which almost every improvement in human welfare has actually arrived, and a five-fold improvement in how a society allocates its resources is, on its face, wonderful. Nor is technological divergence new: printing, electricity, containerised shipping and mobile telephony all opened enormous gaps that then closed, sometimes with startling speed. Kenya leapfrogged retail banking. Betting against diffusion has been a bad trade for two centuries.

I do not think this one diffuses the same way, and the reason is specific. What diffused in every previous case was the artefact — the press, the handset, the container. What is scarce here is not the artefact but the substrate: gigawatts of firm power, capital at hundred-billion scale, and physical facilities that take four years to build. Software crosses borders in seconds. Substations do not. You can hand a country a model. You cannot hand it the ability to train the next one.

So the delta is not a forecast. It is already in the spreadsheet, for anyone who runs the numbers.

The problem is that the countries on the wrong side of it are still running the old numbers, in the old units, and reporting them to parliaments that believe the units still mean something. The first act of sovereignty is not building anything. It is admitting that your instruments have stopped working.