Cognitive Mercantilism - by Venkatesh Rao - Contraptions

kept by eddie oct 27

AI panic mirrors early capitalist anxiety, but history suggests abundant intelligence could transform humans from producers into consumers of thought, sparking new demand and voluntary cognitive effort.

Seeing like a software company
Large software companies sacrifice efficiency for legibility to control scale and enable enterprise deals, despite slowing engineering velocity.
also on Venkatesh Rao
Subscriptions Will Survive in Exactly Two Places
The subscription model survives only for genuine utilities and continuously-fresh-context services; the middle—static SaaS and exhausted catalogs—collapses as income shocks, context saturation, and AI repricing erode its math.
also on Netflix, #economics, #ai
Every book recommended on the Odd Lots Discord
An Odd Lots Discord user scraped and published 842 book recommendations from the podcast's community, sparking debate about the value of curated reading lists.
also on #history, #economics
The Flat Curve Society
Steve Yegge argues AI intelligence growth will appear to plateau for most people due to government restrictions and human discernment limits, while actually continuing exponentially behind locked doors.
also on Netflix, #productivity
We Are (Still) Living in the Long Boring
The era of truly transformative technology ended around 1970, and modern digital advances like AI have not breached the barrier between software and physical reality.
also on #history, #technology, #productivity, #ai