The intelligence curse

Abstract

Long-form essay arguing that as AGI supplants human labor in economically and militarily significant domains, states and firms lose the incentives to invest in ordinary people that historically underwrote broad prosperity and political voice. Sections 3 and 4—Capital, AGI, and human ambition'' and Defining the intelligence curse’’—develop the analogy with the resource curse: when the wealth-generating resource is intelligence embodied in capital and AI rather than in human workers, elites face structural pressure to disempower the population, replicating on a global scale the dynamics observed in petrostates. – AI-generated abstract.