PERSON
Joseph Nye
The political scientist who gave power a second dimension—soft power, the ability to shape preferences through attraction rather than coercion—and whose framework reveals why the most consequential AI competition is not a race to the frontier but a contest for the world's voluntary alignment.
For four decades Joseph Nye argued that the realists were measuring the wrong things. Military hardware and economic leverage—the currencies of hard power—could compel, but they could not attract, and attraction, Nye insisted, was the deeper force. The nation whose culture, values, and institutions others wished to emulate wields influence that no army can replicate. He called it
soft power, and he spent his career showing how it operated through universities, films, multilateral institutions, and the lived experience of people who had reason to admire its source. Applied to artificial intelligence, the framework undergoes its most radical extension: Nye's lens reveals that the AI era's most profound redistribution of capability is not horizontal, between rival states, but vertical, from institutions to individuals, and that the tools themselves—the way they empower or exploit, attract or extract—are the primary instrument of a new global soft-power competition.
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