# Venkatesh Rao: treating intelligence as scarce is the new mercantilism

> An essay argues that AI fear repeats an old economic mistake, and that cheap intelligence could raise demand for human thinking instead of ending it.

- URL: https://devisdead.ai/news/venkatesh-rao-treating-intelligence-as-scarce-is-the-new-mercantilism
- Published: 2026-11-02T19:51:08Z
- Author: DevIsDead Newsroom
- Section: AI vs Humans
- Tags: essay, jobs, open-models, economics
- Originally reported by The Decoder (https://the-decoder.com/ai-elites-might-hoard-intelligence-like-mercantilists-hoarded-gold/).

Most coverage of AI and work counts jobs lost. Engineer and writer Venkatesh Rao wants to count something else: how much more thinking people could do. [The Decoder](https://the-decoder.com/ai-elites-might-hoard-intelligence-like-mercantilists-hoarded-gold/) summarized his essay from his blog, Contraptions. This is a short brief, since we're working from that summary rather than the full essay.

Rao's comparison is mercantilism, the doctrine before capitalism that saw wealth as a fixed stock of land and gold and valued ordinary people mostly as labor. He says many elites now view intelligence the same way: rare and risky, best kept expensive, run by experts and withheld from competitors. Seen that way, open models are a threat, and he accuses some AI executives of using safety fears to win political influence.

His counterexample comes from early capitalism, when people chose to work more days each year so they could buy new goods like tea and sugar. AI could do that for ideas, he argues. Projects that used to be too hard or too costly become possible, so demand for thinking grows. In his view, policy should aim at giving everyone a fair shot at using AI, not at defending today's knowledge jobs. He even expects agents to pursue their own projects, with guardrails but without pure obedience.

It's an argument, not a dataset, and historical analogies bend easily: whether working more days felt like a gain is a debate of its own. Still, it's a useful counterweight to job-loss math that assumes the amount of work is fixed.

**[Scoreboard](/scoreboard) update:** Draw. Cheap intelligence could mean more work for human minds, not less.

Stay undead.