Note - This is just a fun thought experiment. I have used AI to write this article.

Makefiles for AI Civilization

I was thinking about - Will AI ever create a civilization for itself? Or will it just be a tool for humans to build a better civilization?

The above question led me to think about the world as a Makefile. The world is a complex system of dependencies, rules, and targets. It is a system that is constantly evolving and changing. It is a system that is both fragile and resilient.

Imagine if every law, treaty, energy grid, AI model, and supply chain were part of a massive dependency graph. Each policy change would trigger a rebuild. Every shock, a cascading make clean && make all. Every broken contract, an upstream failure.

This isn’t just a metaphor. It’s how civilization increasingly behaves—stitched together from brittle APIs, regulatory links, hardware constraints, and unversioned human trust.

Chaos Theory and Civilization

Chaos theory teaches us that in complex systems and ripple effects. Civilization is no different. A failed bank, a mistranslated treaty, a misaligned model checkpoint, tarrif-war(?): these are our butterflies.

In tightly coupled, globally entangled systems, we can’t afford to rely on intuition alone. We need tooling that anticipates non-linearity. A Makefile that can fail fast, rollback predictably, and surface the invisible interdependencies that matter most.

A Sample Civilizational Makefile


# Makefile for Civilization
# Define targets
.PHONY: all clean build trust
all: build trust
clean:
    @echo "Cleaning up civilization..."
    @rm -rf $(BUILD_DIR) $(TRUST_DIR)
build:
    @echo "Building civilization..."
    @mkdir -p $(BUILD_DIR)
    @echo "Building laws, treaties, and infrastructure..."
    @touch $(BUILD_DIR)/laws $(BUILD_DIR)/treaties $(BUILD_DIR)/infrastructure
trust:
    @echo "Building trust..."
    @mkdir -p $(TRUST_DIR)
    @echo "Building social capital, institutions, and norms..."
    @touch $(TRUST_DIR)/social_capital $(TRUST_DIR)/institutions $(TRUST_DIR)/norms

Civilization as a Build System

Build systems express intent and resolve state through rule-based execution. You don’t instruct make step-by-step. You declare targets and let it resolve dependencies.

Civilization follows a similar logic:

  • Laws define outcomes.
  • Supply chains are deeply nested graphs.
  • Economic policy propagates rebuilds.
  • Diplomacy is versioned, mirrored, and frequently broken.

Every new tariff, treaty, or tech standard is a partial recompile - touching compute, capital, and coordination.

make sovereignty

Sovereignty used to mean borders and flags. Now it means chip fabs, cryptographic primitives, LLM hosting rights, and regulatory jurisdiction over firmware updates.

  • Sovereignty: the ability to build and maintain your own dependencies.
  • Resilience: the ability to recover from systemic failure without foreign intervention.
  • Trust: the ability to audit and verify the provenance of critical infrastructure.
  • Security: the ability to patch or isolate compromised dependencies at runtime.
  • Governance: the ability to update policies without bricking the system.

The modern sovereign doesn’t just control territory—they control source code, root certificates, energy grids, and whether their models call home.

Forking is easy. Maintaining a fork is hard. Especially when upstream deprecates features, and your build graph includes legacy hardware, adversarial peers, and recursive legal frameworks.

The Problem With Implicit Rules

Makefiles fail silently when assumptions go stale. So do civilizations.

  • Education policies assume stable demographics.
  • Monetary policy assumes velocity of money follows historical patterns.
  • Trade agreements assume stable supply chains.

Implicit rules become latent failure points. We need visibility, versioning, and simulation—civilizational equivalents of CI.

make rebuild-trust

Social capital isn’t in the repo, but it’s the most fragile dependency.

  • Engineers trust protocols.
  • Citizens trust elections.
  • Nations trust deterrence.
  • Corporations trust contracts.
  • Governments trust treaties.
  • AI trusts training data.
  • Citizens trust their governments.

Break trust, and even a clean graph won’t build.

Rebooting the Build Graph

We don’t need a programmable society. We need a declarative, debuggable one:

  • Explicit dependencies.
  • Early, visible failures.
  • Transparent infrastructure.

The principles of good systems apply far beyond software.

Game Theory in the Global Makefile

Each actor optimizes locally. Dependencies span boundaries. Build failures become leverage.

  • Withhold semiconductor exports, halt an adversary’s technological advancement
  • Control rare earth minerals, dictate who builds next-gen batteries
  • Fragment internet protocols, create digital sovereignty zones

This is not theoretical. System failures cascade across interdependence graphs:

  • TSMC dominance: One company’s fab schedule dictates global tech release cycles

Governance is merely a coordination protocol. Infrastructure functions simultaneously as utility and vulnerability. The global makefile executes on power dynamics, not cooperative ideals.

Governance is a negotiation protocol. Infrastructure is both tool and threat. The global makefile runs on game theory, not good intentions.

Can Makefiles Save Civilization?

Biological Systems and Build Logic

Cells don’t compile; they express. DNA is a declarative source file, transcription is execution, and proteins are the runtime effect. Biology runs on dependency graphs too-fragile, fault-tolerant, and optimized by evolution. Immune responses resemble make clean && make patch. Civilization, like biology, needs graceful degradation and self-healing over rigidity.

Observability for Civilizations

You can’t debug what you can’t see. Societies need their own logging and telemetry—economic indicators, trust metrics, institutional latency. Historical collapses often weren’t sudden—they were silent. No alarms, just stale state and cascading failures. Without observability, no build system can adapt.

Constitutions encode ideals. Makefiles encode logic.

History shows principles collapse when systems break underneath them:

  • Rome’s republic fell when the state outgrew its protocols.
  • Weimar’s constitution failed under unversioned dependencies: inflation, fragmentation, fascism.

Makefiles don’t assume good faith. They assume entropy and enforce order.

A civilizational Makefile won’t encode morality. But it might expose rot, localize failure, and make recovery tractable.

And maybe—just maybe—a make plan worth trusting.

Conclusion

The world isn’t broken because we lack values—it’s broken because we lack structure. If we want systems that adapt, survive, and scale, we need to build them like engineers: with clarity, observability, and fault tolerance.

Not just ideals, but dependencies. Not just constitutions, but compilers.

As Alan Turing put it, “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

Let’s start with a Makefile.

This is just a fun post. I hope you enjoyed it.