Making AI Headlines · Page 9
Rao Imagines Intelligence in a Vault, Then Questions the Lock
· New York time
Engineer Venkatesh Rao compares fears about AI job losses to mercantilism, with intelligence treated as a scarce resource that elites may want to control. He also argues that AI could increase demand for human thinking, rather than simply making it less valuable. The comparison gives a familiar economic anxiety a new object. Instead of guarding a stockpile of gold, powerful actors would seek control over valuable intelligence and the tools that produce it. Rao's alternative possibility is that wider use of AI encourages more human thought and work. Neither outcome follows automatically from the metaphor. Access to tools, the way businesses use them and the distribution of gains all shape the result. The image is nonetheless useful comedy: executives install a magnificent vault for intelligence, then discover that the difficult part is deciding whether anyone outside is allowed to think with it.
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