CONCEPT
The Vertical Shift
The redistribution of power from institutions to individuals that AI enables — a diffusion that moves vertically through levels of organization rather than horizontally between states, and which existing frameworks built for Westphalian competition cannot adequately model.
The vertical shift is this book's term for the structural change in international power distribution that artificial intelligence produces. For four centuries, international relations theory has analyzed power as something flowing horizontally — between sovereign states, alliances, and blocs. The AI revolution breaks this horizontal axis by enabling power flows that move vertically through levels of organization: from institutions to individuals, from credentialed centers to uncredentialed peripheries, from the gatekeepers of capability to anyone with an idea and a natural-language interface. The unit of analysis can no longer be the state alone. It must include the relationship between states and the individuals they now empower or fail to empower.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The horizontal assumption in international relations derives from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which established the sovereign nation-state as the fundamental unit of the international system. Every major framework since — balance of power, concert of great powers, bipolar Cold