Cognitive Mercantilism: AI panic resembles fears of early capitalism

AI anxiety is framed as “cognitive mercantilism”: the belief that intelligence, like wealth in early mercantilist thinking, is scarce, fixed, and best controlled by elites. Drawing on the history of capitalism, the argument identifies four parallels: nations and firms compete to hoard talent and intellectual property; ordinary people are considered too untrustworthy to use powerful tools freely; policy focuses on controlling the supply and price of intelligence; and most people are assumed to have little intellectual value beyond routine cognitive work. This outlook treats democratized AI as a threat because it imagines that people who no longer produce valuable intelligence will become economically useless.

The historical counterpoint is that agricultural productivity did not create a population of “useless mouths”: it freed most people from farming and enabled them to consume more food while pursuing other work. The proposed AI parallel is that people may become major consumers of intelligence without producing it themselves. Falling costs could also generate new desires and projects, just as expanding trade once introduced ordinary people to goods that encouraged them to work more and seek greater incomes. The resulting transformation would be driven not only by job displacement or resistance to exploitation, but by demand for access to the possibilities abundant intelligence creates. The key economic question becomes how people will use intelligence, and how they will share the gains from its expanding availability.