Compute is the new land

Share on:

For most of history, wealth was tangible. Land, grain, tools. I grew up in Gujarat, India and owning land and trading grains used to be (and still is to a lot of extent) a big part of your capital and inheritance. Wealth used to be measured in how much land you own. An artisan’s wealth used to be his hands and his loom. you measured wealth by counting what you could touch and how many people you could get to work for you. Those were simpler times.

Then we got machines. The steam engine uncoupled power from muscles and raw labor. A factory could make more than a whole village of artisans. Economists had to add capital to their models, and if you owned a factory, you were the new aristocracy.

Now wealth is mostly in computers. You can be rich just by owning a popular app or instagram channel. Servers are a new kind of land. They scale in a way land can’t. We’ve already started outsourcing thinking to code.

The next step is AGI doing more economically valuable work. If we can build it, it will be like adding a new species to the economy. An AGI would be less like a hammer and more like a coworker. It could do the kind of work we thought only humans could. The current economic model assumes human brains are scarce, but that won’t be true if intelligence is abundant and doesn’t get tired. Software’s marginal cost will go to zero which means your highest leverage will be creative thinking, knowing how to think and how to work with your AI companion on surfaces where you choose to do work.

Neither evolution nor markets care about fairness. They just reward whatever works. Biology rewards selection. If we let the market handle AGI, most of the benefits could go to a few people, and the old deal that you have to work to live will break. But unlike genes, we can change laws and customs on purpose.

We’re at a point where AGI could free us from drudgery or make society more unequal. We’ll have to stop equating income with hours worked and GDP with how much stuff machines make. We could design systems so that everyone shares in the benefits of AGI, like a common inheritance. that would let the abundance of artificial labor improve human lives.

we learned how to use fire and farming. we have to do the same with A(G)I. The goal is to fit it into a society that values care and creativity as much as code. We don’t have to let markets decide everything. We can let society + economics evolve with the technology. And we can add some intention to the invisible hand.