Cognitive Mercantilism: AI panic resembles fears of early capitalism

I think this analogy breaks down when considering that the agricultural revolution gave regular people more time to demand new things, but also more time to produce new things, and thus maintained or even increased their economic leverage > My inability to produce food is economically almost irrelevant. What matters is that I can consume it, enjoy it, develop tastes for it, and devote my energies to other things. What the author misses is that what mattered more was that people could now produce more things. People were free from manual labour to perform intellectual labour. But what do people do to produce things when intellectual labour is automated? And with emboddied AI, skilled manual labour too? You need to produce things to be able to reap the fruits of economic progress. Thats what most working people did after the agricultural revolution. What will we produce in a post AI world? And if only the people who own AI will be able to produce things, then why would they give us any power or leverage in the economy?

The analogy between farm work and intelligence work breaks down at their transition continuation, which the author missed, I believe. When the people were were freed from farm labour, due to farm automation, people could find another economic activity which required the other capacity of humans - intelligence. The transition from muscle-power work to mind-work was meaningful, as both muscle and mind were attributes of humans, creating demand for humans having mind power instead of muscle power. But the continuation of that transition breaks down. Muscle power -> Mind power -> ??? Those 3 questions marks at the end are what's scaring people, and what is threatening the stability of the transition from mind work. If both muscle power and mond power are not things of value, how would the humanity progress to create value? Who buys it? Why do they buy it? Who hires whom? Why?

A nice article by bosses for bosses that tells a nice clean story that goes to great lengths to avoid any confrontations with any part of reality that might make them uncomfortable.

People need to think about the future now, it is more urgent than before, we have to decide what to do with our life when (assuming a positive future rather than skynet) AI does the stuff better than us in every category. We have to find a meaning. I know this comment isn't directly related to the AI trades, but every subject regarding AI keeps reminding me of the future we are not ready. I can't imagine what type of professions completely made unnecessary by AI in the following 5 years.

The problem with AI if compared to capitalism is that we start where the same players that won capitalism starts as winners and the rest of us cannot enter the race. AI is not a ”fair” resource. Normal people cannot compete. We can rent capacity of the ones owning the data centres. But we will never have access to the best models. Never be able to afford outbound data centres. We can at any moment lose access to the resource. And the ones controlling the resource will be in control of everything. And it will be privately held. Fantastic.