Freedom in the AI Age
Part Two: Algorithmic Kings and Data Peasants
Technological abundance is real. This should lead to a post-scarcity utopia. Why don’t the owners of this system — likely a handful of mega-corporations or states — lock up access, maintain artificial scarcity, and extract rents forever? Who physically owns the hardware? Who controls the server farms, the robot swarms, the resource inputs? What prevents them from using IP, legal force, or raw coercion to gatekeep abundance?
Why would these actors willingly give up profit margins? Why not maximize extraction from the rest of society? If they try to, who stops them? Even if we open-source everything, don’t we still get bottlenecks? (Rare earths, server chips, energy supply)
How do we prevent local or global monopolies from forming around these choke points?
Billionaires have three obvious incentives:
- Profit: Maximize rent extraction — keep scarcity where it serves them.