AI's Cognitive Mercantilism Mirrors Early Capitalism — SkimNews
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- Joyce Appleby argues in The Relentless Revolution (2010) that capitalism was a historically contingent cultural invention, enabled by agricultural improvements, expanding trade and changing ideas about work and wealth, rather than the inevitable expression of a timeless instinct to trade.
- Cognitive mercantilism mirrors mercantilism's four interlocking beliefs in the source's mapping: intelligence treated as a fixed resource to hoard like bullion, 'stupid people' deemed unfit to think for themselves, supply prioritized while aggregate demand is ignored, and most people assumed good only for low-grade cognitive labor — with 80% of humanity in low-grade work presented as the natural order.
- The agricultural revolution cut the share of people needed to produce food from a large majority to a tiny minority in advanced economies, the source's precedent against the assumption that automating cognitive work merely creates 'billions of useless minds to occupy.'
- Britain's industrious revolution, per Appleby, saw annual days worked rise from roughly 250 to 300 before the Industrial Revolution, with tobacco, tea, sugar and Indian cottons creating consumer demand that made much of the extra labor voluntary, as rising productivity funded surplus incomes that in turn incentivized more productivity.
- C. K. Prahlad captured the late-20th-century version of that shift by calling aggregate global demand the 'fortune at the bottom of the pyramid,' and the source notes labor politics turned partly toward securing a fair share of expanding consumption opportunities — people in third-world slums often willing to cut food spending to buy a TV.
- Most people would no longer need to be significant producers of intelligence to become significant consumers of it, the source argues, which would leave cognitive mercantilism looking as quaint as its seventeenth-century predecessor.
Why it matters: Appleby's four-part mapping puts specific stakes on the table: corporations and states that hoard intelligence as intellectual property gain from scarcity, while demand from ordinary people — the 'fortune at the bottom of the pyramid' Prahlad named by the late 20th century — is the side the mercantilist framing leaves out.
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