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Cognitive Mercantilism: AI panic resembles fears of early capitalism

Venkatesh Rao essay arguing that AI panic resembles mercantilist thinking before capitalism, drawing on Joyce Appleby's history of capitalism to frame intelligence as abundant.

What HN thinks

An essay about cheap intelligence gets graded harshly by the remaining expensive kind.

The analogy breaks down
Farm automation freed people for mental work, but if AI automates mental and manual labour, there is no next step and workers lose their economic leverage.
Power and ownership concentrate
AI is controlled by those who own data centres and frontier models, so gains will flow to existing winners rather than ordinary people, much as early capitalism's gains depended on labour struggles, slavery and colonialism.
Humans keep a role
Some argue AI cannot own context, intention or consequences, or excel at subjective work, so human input is relocated rather than replaced, and AI can extend expertise in places like space missions.

Consensus: Most commenters found the essay unconvincing, criticising it for ignoring power dynamics, labour history and the question of what displaced workers would actually produce. Several also noted it was reportedly written largely by AI.

Summarised by Claude from the comment thread 8 hours ago.