UN secretary-general, António Guterres, used his final address to the general assembly to recast the world’s crises as a single problem. War, inequality, the climate emergency and artificial intelligence, he argued, are not separate crises but chapters of the same story. That story, as he told it, is the story of power: who has it, who is denied it, how it is used and how it is changing.
Guterres identified three shifts. Among states, new centres of economic, political and technological influence have emerged. Power is also moving away from governments to a handful of private corporations and individuals. And humans are increasingly handing power to machines, with AI agents going rogue and lethal autonomous weapons becoming a military reality.
