Based on historian Joyce Appleby, the essayist compares the fear of an excess of intelligence with the mercantilist vision of a rare wealth, to be captured and controlled.
In an essay published on his newsletter Contraptions, Venkatesh Rao starts from Joyce Appleby's book on the history of capitalism. According to her, mercantilism was based on four convictions: wealth is finite, ordinary people must be governed by the elites, only supply counts, and the vast majority of the population has no other destiny than agricultural work. Rao transposes term by term: intelligence would be a scarce resource housed in a few brains, which would have to be accumulated like gold, protected by the masses and kept expensive, while the automation of intellectual work would promise billions of useless minds.
But the agricultural revolution did not create "useless mouths": it freed most people from the fields while giving them access to much more food. Rao also reminds us that even before industrialization, the new taste of the British for tea, sugar or cotton pushed some of them to work voluntarily more, feeding a virtuous circle between demand and productivity.
He draws a hypothesis from this: AI could move humanity from a "subsistence cognition" to a world where most minds become consumers of intelligence rather than producers, free to discover what they want to do with it. Ben Thompson (Stratechery) called the text an indispensable read.
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