Top Dog 2076 Part Two

(5 minute read)

Part Two

Last week I looked at America, China and India and deliberately avoided answering the question I started with: when the United States celebrates its 300th birthday in 2076, will it still be the most powerful country in the world?

Before trying to answer that, there are several other contenders to consider, beginning with Europe.

Europe is complicated because Europe isn't a country. Individually, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and the other European states will probably matter less relative to enormous countries such as America, India and China.

Collectively, however, Europe could remain extraordinarily powerful. It contains hundreds of millions of wealthy, highly educated people, some of the world's most sophisticated industries, two major nuclear powers and an economy comparable in scale with the world's largest.

The important question is whether Europe will increasingly behave as one strategic power or remain a collection of countries whose interests often differ. Fifty years is long enough for either outcome to be possible. A Europe coordinating defense, foreign policy, technology and energy could be one of the world's great centers of power. A Europe in which thirty-odd countries continue pulling in different directions would have considerably less influence than its combined wealth suggests.

Immigration will also play an enormous part in Europe's future. The EU fertility rate fell to just 1.34 children per woman in 2024, far below the replacement level of roughly 2.1, while the proportion of elderly people continues to increase. Immigration is already offsetting natural population decline in much of Europe.

That could be an enormous advantage if Europe attracts people who work, create businesses, acquire skills and successfully become part of the societies they join.

Foreign-born Europeans are already disproportionately concentrated in working ages, precisely where ageing European countries need people.

But immigration can also create political and social tensions if integration fails or populations believe the scale of migration is too high. We can already see that affecting European politics, with right-wing and populist parties gaining considerable support in countries including Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Britain, often with tighter immigration controls among their central policies.

In Britain, Reform UK, a right wing party, has just received an extraordinary £72 million from two donors within 48 hours, giving it financial resources on a scale that would once have been almost unimaginable for a party outside Labour and the Conservatives. To put that figure in perspective in the first quarter of 2026, both Labour and Conservatives raised less than £5 million each.

Money doesn't guarantee electoral success, but it can pay for organization, advertising, staff and candidates, and could make Reform a much more formidable force at the next UK election.

By 2076, Europe could therefore be pulled in very different directions depending on how much immigration individual countries accept, what sort of immigration they encourage, how successfully newcomers integrate and how voters respond politically.

Then there is Africa, which may be the greatest geopolitical wildcard of the century.

Africa's population is expected to grow enormously because it has such a young population today. Nigeria alone could eventually contain several hundred million people, but it could be pulled apart between the Muslim north and the Christian south.

Countries including Ethiopia, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo could become much larger than most European states.

But those numbers aren't destiny. One of the clearest patterns of the last half-century has been that birth rates tend to fall as women become better educated, gain greater economic opportunities, marry later and have reliable access to contraception. That process is already underway across parts of Africa. If development accelerates, fertility could fall faster than current central projections suggest.

That might actually be very good news for Africa. The most interesting possibility isn't simply that Africa ends up with billions more people. It's that better education, infrastructure and opportunities for women could simultaneously reduce population growth and make the population it does have far more productive.

Population is potential rather than power. Africa still needs enormous investment in electricity, transport, education, health care, water and digital infrastructure. Countries that succeed could experience something resembling the economic transformation parts of Asia have undergone during the last fifty years. Those that don't may simply end up with more people sharing already inadequate resources.

I doubt there will be one African country matching America, China or India by 2076, although fifty years is long enough for surprises. I would be astonished, however, if Africa as a whole wasn't vastly more important economically and politically than it is today.

Russia presents almost the opposite case from Africa. It possesses enormous territory, energy and mineral resources, but its population is declining and Russians aren't having enough children to replace themselves. The demographic problem began long before the invasion of Ukraine, but the war has added military casualties, emigration and greater uncertainty to an already difficult situation.

Russia will nevertheless remain extraordinarily important because it possesses one of the world's two largest nuclear arsenals. Russia and America together still hold about 83 percent of the world's stockpiled nuclear warheads.

Without those weapons, however, Russia's long-term demographic and economic weight would look much less impressive beside America, China, India or Europe as a whole. It may therefore remain a formidable military power in 2076 without being one of the world's important economic powers.

There is another possibility, though, and I think it may be more important than almost everything I've written so far.

Perhaps by 2076 we're going to measure national power differently.

For most of history, population mattered enormously because people produced food, manufactured goods, paid taxes and became soldiers. A country containing 100 million productive people usually had enormous advantages over one containing ten million.

AI and robotics could weaken that relationship.

Imagine factories that once employed 20,000 people operating with 500. Imagine fleets of autonomous trucks, robot construction equipment, AI engineers, unmanned aircraft, submarines and perhaps eventually spacecraft. Imagine much of today's programming, accounting, medical diagnosis, research and administration being done partly or almost entirely by machines.

China is already installing more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, while America currently has a huge lead in private AI investment and data-center capacity. At the same time, the performance gap between the best American and Chinese AI models has almost disappeared.

Then consider energy.

AI requires extraordinary amounts of electricity. So do robots, automated factories, desalination plants, synthetic fuels and almost every other technology likely to become important during the next fifty years.

A country capable of producing huge amounts of cheap, reliable energy may therefore possess an advantage that becomes increasingly difficult to separate from economic and military power.

Solar energy will almost certainly be vastly cheaper and more efficient than today. Nuclear power may become easier to build. Batteries will improve, and perhaps fusion will finally become commercially useful. If that happens, the most important national resource of the late twenty-first century may not simply be people or oil.

It may be intelligence multiplied by energy.

A technologically advanced country containing 100 million people, millions of robots and enormously capable AI systems might produce more, discover more and field greater military power than a country containing a billion people but weaker technology.

And that brings me back to America and China.

China has extraordinary advantages. It manufactures at a scale America doesn't currently match, builds infrastructure quickly, dominates the installation of industrial robots and has almost eliminated America's lead in the performance of its best AI systems. Its political system can also concentrate resources behind strategic objectives in a way democratic governments often find difficult.

America's advantages are different. It has deeper capital markets, extraordinary universities and technology companies, enormous energy and agricultural resources, a powerful military, a large alliance system and much better long-term demographics.

Its decentralized political and economic system can appear inefficient, but that same disorder allows companies, researchers and individuals to compete, fail, try strange ideas and occasionally produce startling breakthroughs nobody expected.

I suspect that difference will matter enormously.

AI may allow China to manage a shrinking population far more effectively than would otherwise have been possible. It may also give the Chinese state unprecedented tools for surveillance and political control.

Whether that strengthens China permanently is harder to answer. A government that can see everything its citizens do may become exceptionally effective at maintaining order, but innovation also depends on people being willing to challenge accepted ideas and tell those in authority when they're wrong.

We simply don't know which political and economic system will adapt better to genuinely powerful AI.

So, after two newsletters and rather more speculation than I normally allow myself, who do I think will be the most powerful country on Earth in 2076?

If I had to choose today, I would still choose the United States.

Not because American dominance is inevitable. It certainly isn't. China could remain extraordinarily powerful, India could rise much faster than expected and Europe could become far more unified. AI itself could overturn half the assumptions I've made in these two newsletters.

But America begins the next fifty years with more advantages working simultaneously in its favor than any other country I can see: geography, food, energy, technology, capital, military power, alliances, universities, immigration and a population that isn't expected to collapse.

China's industrial strength is extraordinary, but its demographic reversal is enormous. India has perhaps the greatest long-term opportunity, but still has a tremendous amount of development ahead of it. Europe has the resources to remain a major power but not yet the political unity. Africa has huge potential but even greater infrastructure requirements.

America has problems too. Lots of them.

But when fireworks explode across the United States on July 4, 2076, celebrating three hundred years since the Declaration of Independence, my guess is that Americans will still be living in the most powerful country Earth has ever seen.

But of course, I'm a science fiction writer.

You might want to ask me again fifty years from now.

'til next time,

Brian

BA Gillies
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