From Discourse Magazine, May 15:
As AI revolutionizes the ‘mining’ of ideas, the winners will be those with the biggest mines
There is no such thing as creativity; there’s only recombination of what already exists. And the number of possible recombinations, though vast, is not infinite. On that view, any so-called creative task—writing a song, inking a patent, devising a business—is not an intimate conversation with one’s muse. It’s wildcatting for oil. It’s strip mining.
The mine is the collective, finite repository of ideas that work, that sell, that succeed. And, until now, a billion individual artists have been chipping away at that mine with a billion individual shovels. But artificial intelligence is the invention of dynamite—if not the hydrogen bomb. Soon you’ll ask AI to write you all the songs that haven’t been written yet. Or all the movies that haven’t been scripted yet. Or all the lawsuits that haven’t been filed yet. And it’ll start doing it. With a training repository of all human preferences, it will start sifting through those tranches of sediment and picking out the diamonds.
The artist may well prove a casualty when moguls cut out the middleman and start wildcatting for ideas themselves. But there’s a deeper casualty that’s even more inevitable: capitalism.
Now, put down the lighter fluid—this isn’t another millennial socialist screed. For once, the capitalism killer won’t be a faculty-lounge moonshot that’s never been tried. Rather, it’ll be something that arguably never died in the first place: mercantilism.
You might have forgotten about mercantilism; even in an era of tariff wars and economic nationalism, you only ever hear its name in whispers. Never mind that it’s what settled the known world—blooming from the Renaissance, carrying Columbus across the Atlantic and settling the Americas in its wake. Never mind that it lasted just as long as what we have now, more or less. Mercantilism remains a dirty word because it’s all but synonymous with another—imperialism—which is synonymous with Leopold and the slave trade and the root of all things now dubbed “systemic.” And I’m not going to pretend that’s irrelevant. But I’m going to use the dirty word anyway. What follows is not normative, but descriptive.
Mercantilism is the economic view of the world that says there is limited stuff you can have—a finite amount of gold you can mine, of wealth you can accrue, of value in the world. In the mercantilist view, it is entirely possible for one guy to own everything that exists. And the basic telos mercantilism preaches is: Be that guy. All that matters is having the most stuff because the person with the most stuff wins. And the prize is a life spent fighting off everybody else as they try to take it.
Capitalism’s revolutionary rebuttal isn’t that there’s infinite stuff; hardly anyone is quite that naive. Rather, its rebuttal is that finite stuff can yield infinite growth—such that our ceiling is continually rising as human creativity finds better and better ways to do more with less. It’s the happy enlightenment that’s come to define the romantic west: Stuff runs out, but ideas don’t.
That philosophy is empirically wrong. Ideas are simply not infinite; there is X huge number of things in the universe and Y huger number of ways you can combine and wield them. But, as with chess positions and atoms, these huge numbers are still numbers. And more vitally, what is the number of combinations and uses that are actually valuable? The ones that work, that people will actually pay for? It’s the same as the number of chess moves that actually win: something much smaller than the total number of possibilities. Mercantilism didn’t care how many cockroaches were in the world; it cared how much gold. The good stuff always tends to be more countable in number—and if you can count it, you can hoard it. The mercantilist says you should....
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