Venkatesh Rao on AI Anxiety: Intelligence Is Not a Fixed Resource
Rao argues that treating AI as a resource to be divided up narrows what we can do with it. He sees AI not just expanding the supply of intelligence, but creating new demand for it.
On October 25, Venkatesh Rao published a piece in his newsletter Contraptions comparing today’s anxieties about AI to the mercantilist era that preceded the rise of capitalism. His argument: viewing intelligence as a finite resource to be rationed or controlled leaves us with a narrow sense of what AI is for.
His starting point is Joyce Appleby’s history of capitalism. Rao sets the anxieties of the pre-capitalist mercantilist period, when the total stock of wealth was assumed to be fixed, alongside present-day worries about AI. The focus is not on the capabilities of any particular system but on how people are responding to the broad diffusion of intelligence.
Rao expects AI to do more than increase the supply of intelligence; it can also generate new demand. Rather than asking only how much existing work AI will take over, he suggests we also ask what new work people will want to take on because of it. It is a call to widen the frame through which we look at AI’s role in daily life and at work.
The heart of Rao’s view is that intelligence should not be treated as a fixed allotment to be divided. What to watch from here is what new demand AI actually turns out to create.