The process of taking over the world, or the outcome of having taken over the world?
Outcome
“Absolute control” would be something like “having a veto over any action that a person or group of people deliberately takes anywhere at any scale, and being able to take any action that is knowingly available to any person or any group of people in the world, such that this capability is not diminished by your exercising it”.
Practically, mere approximations of absolute control would do. Intuitively, the “lowest bar” to clear is something like “having enough power in a self-sustaining configuration to sustainably control global features of the world”.
Process
There’s two primary factors to consider, here:
Power is interchangeable.
Financial power (billions of dollars) can be exchanged for political power (bribes, lobbying), or social power (financing propaganda, advertisement, etc.), or technological power (funding/buying companies and having them develop whatever infrastructure you want).
Social power (being trusted/listened-to by millions of people) can be exchanged for financial or political power...
Technological power (having a blueprint of a technology light-years ahead of everyone else’s) can be exchanged for financial power (selling it) or social power (building a personal platform on top of the innovation), or political power (monopolizing it and making a nation cater to your whims)...
And so on.
Power can beget power.
Money can be re-invested.
A politician in your pocket can let you get blackmail on other politicians, or pass laws that advantage you.
A large audience can be instructed to induct other people into your cult, or be made to solve math problems design technologies for you.
Etc.
So, what does “taking over the world” mean? It means amassing enough power in some crucial domain of society, to be able to exert global influence over every other domain of society, while always having enough “power surplus” to keep most of your power in self-perpetuating investments. (Instead of, e. g., spending it all at once on passing a single law globally, and then be left destitute. One-off global changes aren’t global control.)
You can get there by controlling all the money in the world, or the most cutting-edge technologies in the world, or the most advanced communication network in the world, or by having billions of people genuinely listen to you on some important matter (religion, life philosophy...), or controlling the most powerful economy/country/military in the world, or something like this. By having control over an important resource such that the second-best alternative is hopelessly behind, so no-one would be willing to switch, and so everyone would be dependent on you.
Once you have that as a base, you can exert this global control to globally encroach on other domains, by exchanging some of your current power of whatever type you started out with into different types of power: e. g., if you started with a technological monopoly, you spread around into politics and society and finance and communications...
And as you’re doing so, you’re also taking care to be amassing power on net, not spending it. You crush your competition, or make sure to advance faster than them. You do that in a cross-domain fashion: you aim to set up power feedback loops in politics and technology and finance and society, and move power around to always have a “crucial stake” in every domain, and preventing any competitor to your takeover to arise in any other domain.
Eventually, you acquire enough power to just… have all the power in the world. I. e., as I’d said in “outcomes”, you have a veto over any action that anyone deliberately takes at any scale, and you can cause any action that is available to any person or any group of people in the world, and this capability is not diminished by your exercising it.
And the closer you are to this ideal, along dimensions like intensity (you can introduce minor changes/moderate changes/major changes, or popular/tolerable/anti-popular changes), cross-domainity (which of the following you control: finance, technology, economy, society, etc...), fidelity (you can get precisely what you want/roughly what you want/something not unlike what you want), sustainability (how often can you cause global changes without losing power? once a decade/a year/a month/a second), the more you’ve “taken over the world”.
(Aside: The core bottleneck here is the scalability of your control module. You can’t process all that vast information if you’re just a human or a small group of people, so even if you have full control, you may not know to exercise it if e. g. some sufficiently subtle threat to your regime appears, that can only be identified by cross-correlating vast quantities of information. So you’d need to solve that problem somehow. Scale your regime’s ability to process information and take actions in response to it that are aligned with your values. Create truly loyal intelligent sub-commanders (while spending enormous resources on somehow opposing natural bureaucratic rot/perversity/maze dynamics)… or substitute them with AI systems, of course. Which is another reason AI takeover will be easier: digital forks provide an incontestable ability to project power and wield it with fidelity.)
The process of taking over the world, or the outcome of having taken over the world?
Outcome
“Absolute control” would be something like “having a veto over any action that a person or group of people deliberately takes anywhere at any scale, and being able to take any action that is knowingly available to any person or any group of people in the world, such that this capability is not diminished by your exercising it”.
Practically, mere approximations of absolute control would do. Intuitively, the “lowest bar” to clear is something like “having enough power in a self-sustaining configuration to sustainably control global features of the world”.
Process
There’s two primary factors to consider, here:
Power is interchangeable.
Financial power (billions of dollars) can be exchanged for political power (bribes, lobbying), or social power (financing propaganda, advertisement, etc.), or technological power (funding/buying companies and having them develop whatever infrastructure you want).
Social power (being trusted/listened-to by millions of people) can be exchanged for financial or political power...
Technological power (having a blueprint of a technology light-years ahead of everyone else’s) can be exchanged for financial power (selling it) or social power (building a personal platform on top of the innovation), or political power (monopolizing it and making a nation cater to your whims)...
And so on.
Power can beget power.
Money can be re-invested.
A politician in your pocket can let you get blackmail on other politicians, or pass laws that advantage you.
A large audience can be instructed to induct other people into your cult, or be made to
solve math problemsdesign technologies for you.Etc.
So, what does “taking over the world” mean? It means amassing enough power in some crucial domain of society, to be able to exert global influence over every other domain of society, while always having enough “power surplus” to keep most of your power in self-perpetuating investments. (Instead of, e. g., spending it all at once on passing a single law globally, and then be left destitute. One-off global changes aren’t global control.)
You can get there by controlling all the money in the world, or the most cutting-edge technologies in the world, or the most advanced communication network in the world, or by having billions of people genuinely listen to you on some important matter (religion, life philosophy...), or controlling the most powerful economy/country/military in the world, or something like this. By having control over an important resource such that the second-best alternative is hopelessly behind, so no-one would be willing to switch, and so everyone would be dependent on you.
Once you have that as a base, you can exert this global control to globally encroach on other domains, by exchanging some of your current power of whatever type you started out with into different types of power: e. g., if you started with a technological monopoly, you spread around into politics and society and finance and communications...
And as you’re doing so, you’re also taking care to be amassing power on net, not spending it. You crush your competition, or make sure to advance faster than them. You do that in a cross-domain fashion: you aim to set up power feedback loops in politics and technology and finance and society, and move power around to always have a “crucial stake” in every domain, and preventing any competitor to your takeover to arise in any other domain.
Eventually, you acquire enough power to just… have all the power in the world. I. e., as I’d said in “outcomes”, you have a veto over any action that anyone deliberately takes at any scale, and you can cause any action that is available to any person or any group of people in the world, and this capability is not diminished by your exercising it.
And the closer you are to this ideal, along dimensions like intensity (you can introduce minor changes/moderate changes/major changes, or popular/tolerable/anti-popular changes), cross-domainity (which of the following you control: finance, technology, economy, society, etc...), fidelity (you can get precisely what you want/roughly what you want/something not unlike what you want), sustainability (how often can you cause global changes without losing power? once a decade/a year/a month/a second), the more you’ve “taken over the world”.
(Aside: The core bottleneck here is the scalability of your control module. You can’t process all that vast information if you’re just a human or a small group of people, so even if you have full control, you may not know to exercise it if e. g. some sufficiently subtle threat to your regime appears, that can only be identified by cross-correlating vast quantities of information. So you’d need to solve that problem somehow. Scale your regime’s ability to process information and take actions in response to it that are aligned with your values. Create truly loyal intelligent sub-commanders (while spending enormous resources on somehow opposing natural bureaucratic rot/perversity/maze dynamics)… or substitute them with AI systems, of course. Which is another reason AI takeover will be easier: digital forks provide an incontestable ability to project power and wield it with fidelity.)