If several civilisation-scale technologies were arriving at once, which problem would you solve first? The order is not a detail. The order changes the risk.
Consider a planning problem that tends to disappear beneath the more exciting discussion about what transformative technologies might make possible.
Assume that three capabilities become available within roughly the same decade: abundant low-cost energy, dramatically more capable artificial intelligence, and much greater access to space and its resources. Now add one constraint: they cannot all be deployed at once. Physical limits, institutional capacity or deliberate policy force you to choose an order. Which comes first?
Energy looks like the obvious answer. Its benefits are immediate and easy to understand. But if these technologies interact, choosing the most attractive benefit first may be exactly the wrong strategy.
Energy first is the more dangerous order
Cheap abundant energy would do far more than reduce electricity bills. Energy is a major input to computation, and computation is a major input to advanced AI. If AI capability is already moving faster than the institutions intended to govern it, removing an important resource constraint first can accelerate the very system whose governance is least mature. You have not solved one problem independently of the others. You have changed the conditions under which the other problem develops.
That is the sequencing trap. A world with abundant energy and an unresolved AI safety problem is not automatically safer than a world with constrained energy and the same unresolved problem. It may be more dangerous if the new abundance expands the resources available to poorly governed capability faster than it expands our ability to control the consequences. The first intervention can therefore make the second problem harder.
Why this isn’t a novel insight, just a neglected one
The underlying pattern is familiar. Development economics has repeatedly examined what happens when valuable resources arrive faster than the institutions needed to govern them. Sudden resource wealth can improve lives, but under weak governance it can also intensify corruption, rent-seeking and conflict over control of the new wealth. The lesson is not that abundance is bad. It is that abundance and institutional capacity interact.
The same logic applies more broadly. A capability increase does not strengthen every part of a system equally. Actors facing the least friction may exploit it first, including actors operating beyond effective oversight. If the least-governed part of the system also carries the largest potential downside, increasing the resources available to it before governance catches up can magnify the risk. Sequence matters because capabilities compound.
Running the logic on our own moment
Apply that reasoning to the three technologies in the hypothetical. AI capability is currently advancing faster than the international institutions designed to govern its most serious risks. Energy and space have major governance problems of their own, but both operate within older and more developed regulatory traditions. If that assessment is right, AI governance becomes the first sequencing problem, not because AI is the most exciting technology, but because weakness there can be amplified by progress everywhere else.
That conclusion does not depend on any of the more speculative arguments in this publication. The principle stands on its own: when transformative capabilities are coupled, strengthen governance around the least-controlled high-consequence capability before giving the whole system additional leverage. Otherwise each new capability arrives carrying the unresolved risk forward at greater scale.
What this means for how you plan
For anyone allocating attention, capital or policy effort, the useful question comes before the exciting one. Do not ask only, “Which technology offers the biggest opportunity?” Ask, “Which important capability is least governed relative to the consequences it could produce, and what happens if other capabilities accelerate it before that governance improves?” That is not a prediction about the order in which technologies will arrive. It is a way of deciding where preparation has the highest leverage. A competent civilisation would not merely maximise each breakthrough in isolation. It would manage the order in which breakthroughs amplify one another.