Joseph Nye

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The word that kept surfacing was not "power." It was "attraction."

I had been thinking about AI through every lens I could find — philosophy, psychology, economics, ecology, the history of tools. Each one illuminated something real. But I kept hitting the same wall: the frameworks I was using assumed that what matters most is what the technology can do. Capability. Speed. Output. The metrics of the frontier.

Then I encountered Joseph Nye's quiet insistence that the most durable form of influence has nothing to do with what you can force and everything to do with what others voluntarily choose to move toward.

That stopped me.

Because the entire AI discourse is framed as a race. Who builds the most powerful model. Who deploys fastest. Who captures the