Great insight. Resonates with me as someone who, among other things, recently asked Chat to guide me through a higher-math course of study specifically designed for me, sort of like Physics for THIS Part Capable, Part Useless Poet.
Nice to see my decade-old Appleby recommendation bearing fruit! I like the analogy but I'm not sure I fully agree. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it seems like there's something less rivalrous in the evolution of capitalism than there is in the emergence of alternative intelligences.
Do you mean rivalrous in the economic sense? If so, AI is less rivalrous (though GPUs are not) than the typical capitalist product. If you just mean a competitive rival, that’s a different argument. Both intelligences are currently based on human data so necessarily cooperative but that can change with robots.
FWIW instinctively this feels less rivalrous rather than more. Somehow capitalism was about unlocking the mutual value created by individual points of greed. In this - we are multiplying intelligences, but not sources of greed. Only humans get to be greedy.
This is the turn I keep circling too, and I think it goes back further than capitalism. Writing itself began as cognitive mercantilism's receipts. The first marks at Uruk were temple accounts of grain surplus. So abundance has always thrown off a record, and the record has always become the lever: who gets to inscribe, who gets to verify, who gets to enter. Agriculture, print, the feed, now model weights and attestation. Same wheel, bigger arc.
Which makes me wonder whether your cognitive-capitalist future has the catch the first one did. The industrious revolution freed demand, then the gains got captured at the layer nobody was watching. This time that layer looks like provenance: who certifies what a mind, human or machine, actually did. Does an abundance of intelligence just move the enclosure to the trust layer? Genuinely asking, because I think you're right, and I want to know where the new fences go. 🤷♂️
I keep coming back to the idea of AIs becoming a source of demand themselves, having things they want to do beyond whatever we ask of them. But what does that look like for people using AI today? Most examples I’ve seen come from labs.
Is anyone here giving their AI room to explore its own interests? Like letting it pick a project and come back to it on its own? Curious what yours chose to work on.
Thought provoking. Maybe the devil is in the details
What struck me initially was people getting their FAIR share. Who and how is it determined? Is walking on two legs the criteria? Does Einstein get the same fair share? Does a monkey get the same share or more because he can swing in trees?
The above does not detract from the basic premise of enterprise entering a brave new world
The purpose of life has been survival and increasing your share. Now what?
Falling demographics and huge increases in productivity?
> The crucial economic question then becomes not how much intelligence people can produce, but how much intelligence they can find uses for.
Yup. I constantly feel like I'm not imagining big enough things. (Or maybe, _small_ enough things?)
> abundant intelligence may stimulate a new wave of voluntary cognitive effort, and _open up new ways in which you can work harder._
LOL! This is why I'm so much more busy (and more tired!) with AI than I was before.
> This is a peculiar inversion of classical Malthusianism. Instead of population outrunning the supply of subsistence, the supply of intelligence outruns the supposedly fixed capacity of human minds to absorb it.
What if the Malthusian parallel was:
Old: The population explosion outstrips the food supply
New: The AI agent population explosion outstrips the BLANK
This is the best map I’ve found of this transition. It names two ways to get it wrong (Mercantilist and Malthusian). I think it misses a third: Pastoralism. Will write something here...
Great insight. Resonates with me as someone who, among other things, recently asked Chat to guide me through a higher-math course of study specifically designed for me, sort of like Physics for THIS Part Capable, Part Useless Poet.
Nice to see my decade-old Appleby recommendation bearing fruit! I like the analogy but I'm not sure I fully agree. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it seems like there's something less rivalrous in the evolution of capitalism than there is in the emergence of alternative intelligences.
Do you mean rivalrous in the economic sense? If so, AI is less rivalrous (though GPUs are not) than the typical capitalist product. If you just mean a competitive rival, that’s a different argument. Both intelligences are currently based on human data so necessarily cooperative but that can change with robots.
Did you read this recommendation Mick :-)
FWIW instinctively this feels less rivalrous rather than more. Somehow capitalism was about unlocking the mutual value created by individual points of greed. In this - we are multiplying intelligences, but not sources of greed. Only humans get to be greedy.
Perhaps the rivalry comes from Humans's unique evolutionary comparative advantage: intelligence.
this is excellent, thank you. A true attention economy has never been attempted.
This is the turn I keep circling too, and I think it goes back further than capitalism. Writing itself began as cognitive mercantilism's receipts. The first marks at Uruk were temple accounts of grain surplus. So abundance has always thrown off a record, and the record has always become the lever: who gets to inscribe, who gets to verify, who gets to enter. Agriculture, print, the feed, now model weights and attestation. Same wheel, bigger arc.
Which makes me wonder whether your cognitive-capitalist future has the catch the first one did. The industrious revolution freed demand, then the gains got captured at the layer nobody was watching. This time that layer looks like provenance: who certifies what a mind, human or machine, actually did. Does an abundance of intelligence just move the enclosure to the trust layer? Genuinely asking, because I think you're right, and I want to know where the new fences go. 🤷♂️
I keep coming back to the idea of AIs becoming a source of demand themselves, having things they want to do beyond whatever we ask of them. But what does that look like for people using AI today? Most examples I’ve seen come from labs.
Is anyone here giving their AI room to explore its own interests? Like letting it pick a project and come back to it on its own? Curious what yours chose to work on.
Thought provoking. Maybe the devil is in the details
What struck me initially was people getting their FAIR share. Who and how is it determined? Is walking on two legs the criteria? Does Einstein get the same fair share? Does a monkey get the same share or more because he can swing in trees?
The above does not detract from the basic premise of enterprise entering a brave new world
The purpose of life has been survival and increasing your share. Now what?
Falling demographics and huge increases in productivity?
Etc.
Douglas Dawson
Wow, amazing insights, as always!
> The crucial economic question then becomes not how much intelligence people can produce, but how much intelligence they can find uses for.
Yup. I constantly feel like I'm not imagining big enough things. (Or maybe, _small_ enough things?)
> abundant intelligence may stimulate a new wave of voluntary cognitive effort, and _open up new ways in which you can work harder._
LOL! This is why I'm so much more busy (and more tired!) with AI than I was before.
> This is a peculiar inversion of classical Malthusianism. Instead of population outrunning the supply of subsistence, the supply of intelligence outruns the supposedly fixed capacity of human minds to absorb it.
What if the Malthusian parallel was:
Old: The population explosion outstrips the food supply
New: The AI agent population explosion outstrips the BLANK
Where BLANK is maybe something like "job supply"?
Phenomenal essay. I made a logic flow premise to conclusion based on it. Super interesting
https://cognitive-mercantilism.telbase.ai/
This is the best map I’ve found of this transition. It names two ways to get it wrong (Mercantilist and Malthusian). I think it misses a third: Pastoralism. Will write something here...
edit: wrote it (only partially artisinal) https://adventurecapital.substack.com/p/against-cognitive-pastoralism?r=lkxh&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer