智能变便宜之后，人会变得无用，还是开始想做更多事？

Rao's cognitive mercantilism describes a worldview that treats intelligence as a scarce stock to control, while overlooking ordinary people's capacity to create demand and pursue new possibilities.

The farming analogy suggests that people may become significant consumers of intelligence without producing all of it themselves, freeing their effort for activities that were previously out of reach.

NLW identifies six ways AI might unlock demand by lowering price, improving access, reducing complexity, increasing continuity, enabling personalization, and strengthening meaningful relationships.

In the historical account retold by Rao, new consumer desires encouraged additional work and productivity, illustrating how demand and productive capacity can expand together rather than remain fixed.

Rao argues that better tools and access can raise the returns on attention, motivating people to investigate and build things they previously had little reason or ability to pursue.

NLW distinguishes the anxiety of an apparently endless backlog from the excitement of newly feasible projects, showing that working more with AI can reflect different motivations rather than one universal effect.

Rao suggests that the politics of abundant intelligence may center on access, the freedom to pursue projects, and a fair share of expanding opportunities, not only on preserving existing cognitive jobs.

The essay separates cognitive mercantilism, which fears losing control of scarce intelligence, from AI Malthusianism, which fears an excess of intelligence that supposedly fixed human demand cannot absorb.

NLW interprets the essay's more speculative extension as AI-centered systems creating new pathways and needs for intelligence, rather than AI becoming a conscious consumer with human desires.

NLW argues that optimism about expanding possibilities can coexist with concern about displacement and specific safety risks, so the challenge is to manage the transition rather than assume it will be costless.