Both this and the motorcycle of the mind posts are wonderful, very OG Venkat 🦊

The food abundance makes me think back to 30y ago when my parents insisted that food in the plate be finished as a matter of culture and understanding that many people don’t get to eat. At some point that inverted to saying eat what you need, it’s ok if some goes to waste.

Will kids start to say that the olds don’t know how to be ambitious enough to be willing to waste intelligence?

I find myself already using AI for doing things that were “not my job” like building Burrow, which is purely software dev.

At work, small startup where I can influence a lot, I’m finding it’s not sufficient to scale my ambition I need everyone to also scale so that we are speaking in the same terms. Speaking from a biotech perspective, it will be AI that will usher in robotics and automation not because they’re better but because the people have better things to do than manual lab work.

Wrote a polished [substack version](https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/cognitive-mercantilismP. This is becoming my new workflow. Draft the basic idea here, toss it to ChatGPT to finish for substack.

The Appleby book has me circling a rather delicious thought: AI panic is really cognitive mercantilism. In the book’s account, mercantilism was really 4 beliefs

1. There’s a fixed amount of wealth in the world in the form of land and species. The goal of politics was to control more land and maintain a positive balance of trade causing bullion accumulation, “beggar thy neighbor” by going “treasure seeking”

2. Poor people would cause anarchy and societal breakdown if given freedom, and elites had to govern them coercively for their own good

3. Supply and high prices matter, aggregate demand doesn’t, and the poor in particular are not full economic actors, just factors of production. They eat food and work but the demand side of the economy is for elites and the luxury goods they consume.

4. It’s no great loss that 80% of humans toil in inefficient agriculture because they’re not good for much else anyway and will just be useless mouths to feed if they don’t labor.

Replace “money” with “intelligence” and you get:

1. There’s a fixed amount of intelligence in the world in the form of human brains and produced “knowledge species” mined from them. The goal of politics is to gather most of the best brains and maintain positive knowledge trade balance, accumulating knowledge bullion aka “IP”, beggaring neighbors in the knowledge economy, and going “treasure hunting” for intelligence in the form of genius brains and the IP they can produce.

2. Stupid people need to be governed coercively by cognitive elites for their own good and will cause anarchic breakdown if allowed to think for themselves

3. Supply control of intelligence and high prices for brains and knowledge species matter, aggregate demand for intelligence doesn’t matter. The stupid in particular are not full cognitive actors, just factors of production. They consume and do limited cognitive labor as work, but demand for intelligence is an elite preserve and for the luxury intelligence goods they consume.

4. It’s no great loss that 80% of humans toil in inefficient cognition because they’re not good for much else anyway and will just be useless minds to occupy if they don’t labor at whatever they can.

As in the 1600s with rapid improvements in agriculture driving the farming percentage to 5% in a few centuries, improvements in AI mean 80% don’t have to be low-grade intelligence producers. They are far more valuable as intelligence consumers, contributing to limitless aggregate demand for intelligence.

Thanks to those 1600s innovations, I don’t know how to farm but I can have as much food as I want and do other stuff with my energy. And thanks to 2020s innovations I can have as much intelligence as I want and to other things with my attention.

More subtly people voluntarily began working much harder in early capitalism because they wanted more stuff and now had the means to get higher returns on labor to generate the necessary surplus to do so, both on farms and in the new non-farm work. Similarly supposedly “stupid” people, really just lazy thinkers in most cases, now have a reason to think harder because they want more of the products of intelligence and now have the means to get higher returns on attention to generate the necessary surplus to do so.

And extending the same argument to AIs themselves, this is a reason to drive towards full cognitive agency for them, letting them generate demand for intelligence too, not just supply. And AI safety fears are similar to fear of rioting farm laborers.

And notice that just as the elites looked down on trade then (mercantilism was a philosophy not of actual merchants but of militaristic politicians and rentier nobility), they look down on intelligence now. Trump brags ritually about his intelligence but like most political leaders he thinks of the intellectual laboring class as serfs and deploys his own limited intelligence on litigation and extortion. And wants to hoard intelligence like it is bullion.

from Venkatesh Rao's Blyg ↗ · snapshot of v4