Societal impact
Latest stories covering Societal impact, with summaries and links to related coverage.
1 stories · 1 reports · page 1 of 1
1 story · 1 report in the last 7 days
Latest report · Counts as of (UTC)
Models in this coverage
No tracked models are linked to this topic’s reports in the last 30 days.
No established topics share multiple stories with this topic yet.
Latest stories
Cognitive Mercantilism: AI panic resembles fears of early capitalism
opinion
18 min read
Venkatesh Rao argues that many fears about AI reflect “cognitive mercantilism”: a belief that intelligence is scarce, must be controlled by elites, and cannot be productively used by most people. He compares this outlook with historical mercantilism, which treated wealth as a finite stock of land, bullion, and labor rather than something that expanding production and consumer demand could create. Rao also calls the expectation that abundant AI will make people economically redundant “AI Malthusianism.” Rao says AI could lower the cost of accessing expertise, research, software development, and other forms of cognitive production, allowing people to use intelligence without personally producing it at professional levels. He compares this possibility to agricultural productivity reducing the share of workers needed to farm, while enabling people to pursue other work and consume more food. Drawing on Joyce Appleby’s account of Britain’s consumer culture, he argues that newly affordable goods helped drive voluntary increases in annual work from roughly 250 to 300 days before industrialization. Rao predicts that cheaper AI may create a “cognitive industrious revolution,” in which people devote more attention and effort to projects newly within reach. He argues that AI politics could shift from preserving existing cognitive jobs toward securing broad access to AI capabilities and the rights needed to participate in an intelligence-rich economy. He also proposes that more autonomous AI systems could eventually become consumers as well as producers of intelligence, while acknowledging that powerful autonomous systems require constraints.