@chr1sa: In all of human history, has there ever been a commodity with infinite demand, as there appears to be for intelligence?…
Summary
A reflection on whether intelligence is an unprecedented commodity with infinite or recursively expanding demand, unlike any other in human history, potentially requiring new economic models.
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Cached at: 05/25/26, 04:30 AM
In all of human history, has there ever been a commodity with infinite demand, as there appears to be for intelligence? I can’t think of one. Even compute, energy or just silicon/sand are just downstream of intelligence, which is the main demand driver.
In economics, rather than modeling the usual price/demand curve to reach an equilibrium, perhaps you’d have to model price/rate of demand growth (ie, the derivative of demand, or some other indicator of velocity)
Interestingly, ChatGPT (below) prefers the framework of “recursive expansion of demand” as increasing intelligence opens new applications/markets.
But the end result is the same – the demand curve keeps moving to the right, maybe forever.
Which I think is unprecedented.
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