AI Panic Is Just Cognitive Mercantilism All Over Again
Cognitive Mercantilism: AI panic resembles fears of early capitalism
Venkatesh Rao draws on Joyce Appleby's history of capitalism to argue that today's AI panic mirrors early mercantilism: intelligence is treated as a fixed, scarce resource to be hoarded by elites, ordinary people are distrusted with it, and supply is obsessed over while demand is ignored. But just as capitalism discovered that ordinary people could be consumers and creators of wealth, AI may turn most people into significant consumers of intelligence rather than producers—and that demand has no obvious ceiling.
The analogous possibility with AI is that most people will no longer need to be significant producers of intelligence in order to become significant consumers of it.