The Parasocial Paradox of Technological Progress in the Legal Innovation of World-Leading States: A Longitudinal Analysis with the Roman Empire

The article examines how interstate competition serves as a catalyst for scientific and technological progress while simultaneously accelerating the evolution of legal systems. From a historical-comparative perspective, it analyzes the precedent of the Roman Empire, in which law functioned as a “social technology” for integrating and governing a multinational space, reducing transaction costs and ensuring institutional resilience under the limited technological dynamism of antiquity. This experience is compared with the contemporary U.S.–China technological race, where rivalry manifests not only in large language models and robotics but also in infrastructural strategies for supercomputing (data centers, “cold” territories, and energy solutions). The theoretical framework incorporates ideas of “creative destruction” and conflict strategy, allowing competition to be interpreted as a source of a parasocial effect of mutual acceleration even in the absence of direct cooperation. Methodologically, the study relies on interdisciplinary comparative-historical analysis, a political-economic assessment of innovation policy, and scenario modeling over a 10–20-year horizon. The article substantiates a shift in law from a reactive model toward anticipatory regulation (sandboxes, iterative norms, smart contracts) and formulates the concept of “super-law” an adaptive, technologically oriented, and human-centered normative architecture for the era of AI and autonomous systems. The study concludes that competition can be productive provided it is constrained by legal and ethical safeguards and that international “rules of the race” are necessary to minimize escalation risks and unsafe technological competition.