Cognitive Mercantilism

AI panic is a form of cognitive mercantilism, and abundant intelligence may expand demand rather than leave people useless. Joyce Appleby's The Relentless Revolution (2010) describes how agricultural gains freed most people from farming without leaving them useless. Appleby also describes Britons voluntarily raising annual days worked from about 250 to 300 before the Industrial Revolution to buy goods such as tobacco and tea. By analogy, the key question for AI is how much intelligence people can find uses for, a demand with no obvious upper bound.