Despite this, a minor technological and social advantage allowed one small sheep-filled rock in the north-east corner of the Atlantic to hold 25% of world GDP, population, and land area (though not all at the same time), and to hold on to >20% of world GDP for about 70 years.

For better and for worse AI, as it currently exists, is not shaped like our minds. Better for us, because machine learning needs a lot of examples, so if we invent a different behaviour or create a different environment, a machine would struggle to cope with it, this is also why they needed to read basically the entire public internet to get good; worse for us, because the hardware it runs on comes with an absurd speed advantage, which is why they are able to read the entire public internet and by extension when they got good they got good at basically every subject at the same time.