<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # The sovereignty of a nation rests on two... > **The sovereignty of a nation rests on two capacities, prosperity and security, and in this century both of them are downstream of machine intelligence.** A state that cannot produce intelligence, or cannot secure the supply chains through which it obtains intelligence, has handed its prosperity and its defense to whoever sells it the tokens. That dependency is what the corpus calls [[wiki/Exit Cost|exit cost]]: the measure of whether a nation can decline a supplier and still function. {{A country that must buy its intelligence from abroad has surrendered its sovereignty in the only currency that will matter, and it will discover the surrender the first time the supplier says no.}} The American citizen should hear the build-out debate in exactly those terms. Every blocked factory, delayed interconnection and moratorium bill raises the country's exit cost and lowers its [[wiki/Practical Sovereignty|practical sovereignty]]. **Source:** [[articles/Vertically Integrating an AI Superpower from AI Factory to Citizen|Vertically Integrating an AI Superpower from AI Factory to Citizen]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “The sovereignty of a nation rests on two capacities, prosperity and security, and in this century both of them are downstream of machine intelligence. A state that cannot produce intelligence, or cannot secure the supply chains through which it obtains intelligence, has handed its prosperity and its defense to whoever sells it the tokens. That dependency is what the corpus calls exit cost: the measure of whether a nation can decline a supplier and still function. A country that must buy its intelligence from abroad has surrendered its sovereignty in the only currency that will matter, and it will discover the surrender the first time the supplier says no. The American citizen should hear the build-out debate in exactly those terms. Every blocked factory, delayed interconnection and moratorium bill raises the country's exit cost and lowers its practical sovereignty.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-sovereignty-nation-rests-lowers-practical-sovereignty ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->