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They tell me talk is cheap. But is it, really? Even chatting with a bot nowadays can involve a hefty subscription fee. And there are plenty of human professionals, from counselors to consultants, whose conversations also come with a price tag.

Let’s talk—but first give me your credit card number….

Yes, everywhere I look talk is expensive. Even the scammers who carpet bomb my phone now rely on recorded messages, adding insult to injury—you know it’s bad when con artists are too busy to talk to us. I guess if you want cheap talk nowadays, you’re advised to talk to yourself, like Robert De Niro on a bad hair day.

I’d rather live in a different kind of world—one where dialogue is priceless and conversation is celebrated as a source of human connection. As such, it deserves our protection and respect. When we stop speaking to each other, we soon start warring. Our better nature descends to the bestial.

In that spirit, I’m showcasing the greatest hits in the history of conversation. It has an illustrious lineage, traced back to the divine—and was the originating gift that made all society and its benefits possible.

Here are the 42 milestone moments, as I see them.

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42 Milestones in the History of Conversation

900 BC: The first texts of Judeo-Christian scripture portray God in frequent conversation with humans.

God, in these texts, speaks directly with people—sometimes in flamboyant ways (from a burning bush, on a mountaintop) but with total immediacy. This happens less often in later scripture, but creates a lasting tradition of prayer and intercession where the divine is accessed in intimate conversation.

500 BC: Greek tragedy introduces the dialogue, changing a sacrificial ritual into public entertainment.

The Greek dramatist Aeschylus changes the rules of theater—allowing characters to talk to each other onstage. Previously they only spoke to the chorus. Conversation now serves as a cornerstone for public storytelling.

400 BC: The Socratic dialogue creates turmoil in Athens.

Socrates introduces the idea of teaching philosophy via conversations. But the authorities are always suspicious of open discussions of this sort. So Socrates gets accused of corrupting the youth, and is executed. But his student Plato turns the Socratic dialogue into the building block of Western philosophy.

350 BC: Aristotle writes a treatise on rhetoric—legitimizing the use of speech and conversation to persuade.

Plato had tried to discredit sophistry and rhetoric as tools of persuasion—he valued the truth higher than these speaking techniques. But Aristotle writes a book on rhetoric, and establishes it as a core part of Western education.

81 BC: The Discourses on Salt and Iron shake up the Chinese economy.

After the death of Chinese Emperor Zhao of Han, the regent Huo Guang invites leading scholars to the imperial court to hold a debate on economic policy. This is an important milestone in the history of open societies. Decisions are made after a give-and-take, and thus can draw on the best ideas, regardless of their source.

100 AD The Gospel of John identifies the divine source of creation with the logos or word.

It’s one of the best known—and opaque—claims in the Gospels: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

610: Muhammad receives the first revelation of the Koran in dialogue with the archangel Gabriel.

While secluded in a mountain cave, Mohammad has a vision of the archangel Gabriel, who engages in discourse and teaches him to recite holy scripture. They continue this conversation for the next two decades.

800: Female slave singers during the Abbasid Caliphate are prized for their conversational skills—and sometimes talk back haughtily to powerful people.

The female slave singers of the Arabic world, known as qiyān, enjoy liberties that most free women can’t match at the time. They can move about in public without covering their faces. They can wear colorful outfits. And they are celebrated for their banter—so much so that they often talk back to their owner.

They also set a precedent for the later evolution of the love song in Europe (see below).

1200: Female troubadours (or trobairitz) introduce a more conversational style of love song into France.

The male troubadours developed a more stylized and idealized approach, but their female counterparts prefer a direct, conversational tone. This is a turning point in the history of song as a source of self-expression.

1516: The quotation mark appears for the first time in a published book.

Printer Mathias Schurer boldly introduces a new punctuation mark in his edition of Philostratus's De Vitis Sophistarum. Schurer put these paired inverted commas at the start of each line of quoted text.

There’s some irony in the fact that this book is a guide to sophistry—precisely the kind of discourse that Plato hated so fervently and tried to counter with his dialogues.

This is what quotation marks looked like 500 years ago.

1600: The talkative sidekick is invented.

At almost the same moment, the two greatest creative minds in Europe invent the concept of the sidekick—a talkative and sociable companion to the story’s hero. Cervantes gives Sancho Panza this role in Don Quixote, and the banter never stops. Shakespeare does something similar with Falstaff, who plays the role of entertaining drinking companion to Prince Hal in his history plays.

This character type was unknown in ancient tragedy or Grail legends or epic poetry. All future sidekicks in entertainment—Robin for Batman, McMahon for Carson, Watson for Sherlock, Chewbacca for Solo—build on these late Renaissance innovations.

Mid 1700s: Debating societies come out of hiding, and become popular entertainment in London.

The first debating societies in England operated in secret—because free speech is always dangerous. But during the middle of the eighteenth century they come out in the open and play a key role in supporting democracy. The Society of Cogers, founded in 1755, still operates today—and is the oldest debating organization in the world.

1789: The US Bill of Rights establishes freedom of speech in its very first sentence.

In a radical move with long-lasting implications, the Bill of Rights declares that the government cannot make a law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievance.”

1789: Political clubs play a key role in the French Revolution—and spread all over the country.

The French Revolution was fought as much with words as weapons, and political organizations such as the Jacobin Club served as forums where conversation easily turned into action. The clubs were popular all over the country, and served as launching pads for political parties.

1858: The Lincoln-Douglas debates define the future of American democracy.

In a strange quirk, the two candidates for Senator from Illinois would compete again for the presidency two years later. Their seven early debates address all the divisive issues of the era, especially slavery. Thousands of people attend and listen attentively for hours as the two candidates parleyed back and forth. American politics has rarely matched this level of open, unfettered exchange in subsequent years.

1876: The first phone conversation in history is a short one.

Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates his new invention by talking to his assistant Thomas Watson over the phone. His brief message was: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” But doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of the phone?

1901: Freud explains the Freudian slip.

In his book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud explains that the mistakes we make while speaking reveal the inner workings of our psyche. “The thoughts outside the intended speech,” he explains “determine the origin of the speech-blunder, and also suffice to explain the newly formed mistakes in speech.”

1903: Henry James writes a novel—The Ambassadors—in which almost every conversation hides multiples levels of unspoken agendas.

The Ambassadors is destined to become a famously difficult book, feared even by the bravest grad students today. But it reaches a new level in the psychological novel, and shows how much remains unsaid even when we speak our mind. Joel Miller, in a recent Substack analysis, identifies six different levels of meaning in the conversations presented in this book.

1906: The first covert listening device is patented in the US.

Kelley M. Turner patents the first bugging device—with a microphone in one location connected to a speaker in another. The listener has the option of preserving the bugged conversation on a record. This device was embraced by law enforcement, launching a never-ending practice of surveillance of private conversations.

1915: T.S. Eliot ridicules ‘serious’ conversations.

“In the room the women come and go,” he writes. “Talking of Michelangelo.” The modernist debunking of conventional highbrow culture has now begun in earnest.

1919: Arthur Crew Inman pays people to talk to him—and turns it into the 177 volumes (now in Harvard Library).

Was Inman crazy or brilliant—or maybe just creepy? As a young man, he started paying total strangers to come to his house and tell him stories about their lives. He wrote these down in voluminous diaries—a brutally honest account of 20th century Americn life featuring more than 1,000 characters. Harvard later acquired the diaries and published extracts in two volumes.

1927: The introduction of the “talking movie” changes the course of modern entertainment.

As soon as the public had a taste of the “talkies” everything changed in Hollywood. All the studios embraced the new technology, and movie theaters did the same. Before the end of the decade, the changeover was complete.

1928: In Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, characters on the stage talk to the audience.

This experimental play broke many rules, but gained particular notoriety for its direct address to the audience. Many mocked this maneuver, but it didn’t prevent O’Neill from winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

1930: The Marx Brothers turn Strange Interlude into a joke.

Groucho Marx pokes fun at Eugene O’Neill by inserting direct-to-the-audience interludes in his comedy film Animal Crackers. At one point he says: “If I were Eugene O'Neill, I could tell you what I really think of you two.”

1937: Abbott and Costello have a breakout success with “Who’s on First?”

Time magazine later claimed this is the greatest comedy skit of the 20th century—and for once they got something right. It’s based on a simple failure of communication during a discussion of baseball.

1950: Alan Turing invents the Turing Test—which judges artificial intelligence on its ability to hold a plausible conversation.

In his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing decides that the best way to decide whether a machine can think is to engage it in conversation. Drawing on an argument that resembles the old “if it quacks like a duck” meme, he decides that if a machine can converse like an intelligent being, it is an intelligent being.

1951: Carl Rogers introduces a new method of non-confrontational dialogue.

In his paper “Communication: Its Blocking and its Facilitation” (1951), Rogers offers a new method of conversation that reduces tension and friction. In this approach, he begins each response by summarizing what his interlocutor just said.

“Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker, and to that speaker’s satisfaction,” Rogers explains. This technique, he claims, reduces antagonism and builds empathy.

This Rogerian approach becomes a powerful technique in therapy, but also in negotiations and other contexts. His technique later contributes to the design of chatbots (see entry on ELIZA below).

1951: The first TV talk show is introduced in New York.

Broadcaster Joe Franklin has a wild idea—why doesn’t he just sit in front of a TV camera and talk to people. He convinces WJZ-TV (later WABC-TV) to put this low-cost entertainment on the airwaves. The format catches on and spreads everywhere. NBC launches The Tonight Show four years later.

1960: Kennedy faces Nixon in the first televised US presidential debate.

For the first time in history, the two candidates for the Oval Office face off in a televised debate—the first of four encounters between these political opponents. The verdict of history is that Nixon lost because he looked nervous and less telegenic. He probably had the same view—judging by the fact that Nixon refused to do debates when he ran again for president in 1968 and 1972. But in subsequent years, these televised jousts have served as an essential part of US democracy.

1966: Simon & Garfunkel record “The Dangling Conversation.”

Released in the Summer of 1966, this song presents a dialogue at cross purposes (“Can analysis be worthwhile?” “Is the theater really dead?”). The divide between the speakers seemed to echo the fraught national conversation of the period.

1966: ELIZA attempts (and sometimes passes) the Turing test.

ELIZA, a language processing program created at MIT, attempts to pass the Turing test, and sometimes could convince people that it offered human responses. As late as 2023, ELIZA was still able to out-perform ChatGPT in Turing evaluations.

It’s worth noting that ELIZA borrowed on the dialogue techniques of Carl Rogers (see above) in creating an impression that it was human, not a machine.

1967: The Captain in Cool Hand Luke complains about a failure to communicate.

After this film came out, people all over America started repeating the now famous comment of the movie’s prison warden (played by Strother Martin), who explains his reason for pummeling defiant prisoner Paul Newman: “What we've got here is a failure to communicate.” The counterculture took up this mantra as a sign of callous authority figures. I’m hardly surprised that many people still think that Lyndon Johnson originated this line.

1971: The first email is sent—but it only travels a few inches.

Computer scientist Ray Tomlinson wants to send information over ARPANET (a precursor to the Internet). So he sets up two computers next to each other, and transmits a message.

What was the message? History has not preserved it. "The test messages were entirely forgettable,” Tomlinson later admitted, “and I have, therefore, forgotten them."

In other words, email hasn’t changed a bit since day one.

1974 Francis Ford Coppola releases his film The Conversation.

What did Francis Ford Coppola do between The Godfather and The Godfather II. For one thing, he made The Conversation, Protagonist Henry Caul (played by Gene Hackman) specializes in spying on people in conversation. But sometimes he learns less than he thinks. This underrated film thus mocks both the surveillance state and demonstrates the opacity of the spoken word.

1975: William Gaddis writes an award-winning 700-page novel almost entirely in dialogue.

Gaddis’s first novel The Recognitions (1955) is a landmark in American fiction, but famously dense and difficult. So readers welcomed his faster-paced followup JR, which consists almost entirely conversations. But this was just as difficult as its predecessor, and it’s often hard to figure out who is talking at any given juncture. That didn’t prevent JR from winning the National Book Award and becoming a cult classic.

1976: Robert DeNiro talks to himself in a mirror in Taxi Driver.

Robert DeNiro improvises a classic bit of postmodern craziness in Taxi Driver, and the scene becomes a cinema classic. The refrain ‘You talkin’ to me?” repeated without anyone else in the room, captures the quintessential loneliness that now permeates society via chatbot conversations

1982: Frank Zappa listens to his daughter talk on the phone, and turns it into the hit song “Valley Girl.”

This is the only radio hit Zappa ever enjoyed, and most of the credit goes to his daughter—whose strange way of speaking to her friends got dubbed “Valleytalk” in the aftermath.

1992: The first text message is sent—but there’s no reply.

Neil Papworth, an engineer at Vodafone UK, is working on a system to send short messages via the phone network. So he decides to send a holiday greeting to his colleague Richard Jarvis.He thus dispatches the short text “Merry Christmas” from his computer to Jarvis’s phone.

The message arrives, but the receiving phone has no capability of responding. So Jarvis has to phone Papworth to tell him that he had received the text. A year later, Nokia introduces texting as a feature on its phones.

1993: The New York Times tries to figure out why people are accenting the final syllable in everything they say.

The Times notes the increasing frequency of declarative statements phrased as if they were questions—due to an unexpected accent on the final syllable. The Times calls this uptalk, and notes its prevalence among teenagers. British comedian Rory McGrath describes this usage as the “moronic interrogative.”

2008: Mansplain enters the vocabulary.

Rebecca Solnit writes an article for the LA Times describing the process by which “men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about.”

A few weeks later, the term “mansplain” starts appearing everywhere, referring to condescending, longwinded, often inaccurate explanations in which the mansplainer assumes total ignorance on the part of his interlocutor.

2009: Joe Rogan starts podcasting.

Rogan launches a no-frills talk show on the Internet. The format, he explains, is people “sitting in front of laptops bullshitting.” The audience turns out to be surprisingly large. Eleven years later, Rogan signs a $200 million distribution deal with Spotify.

2022: OpenAI introduces ChatGPT—introducing a new era in conversation without humans.

AI now rebrands itself as chatting, and reaches out to the mass market. Conversation will never be the same.

Ah, in some ways, we have gone full circle. Our history of conversation started with people consulting a higher power—a deity that was sometimes friendly, but often vengeful. Folks are doing it all over again, but with the whole shebang supported by massive data centers and trillions of dollars in investment.

What could possibly go wrong?

Book	Evidence of enthusiasm	Interpretation
Charles C. Mann, 1491	“one of my favorite books ever, in any field.” May 22, 2011.	Among his clearest unrestricted endorsements. The post reviews 1493, but this particular praise explicitly concerns 1491.
Robert Caro, The Power Broker	“one of the best non-fiction books ever.” April 15, 2012.	An enduring benchmark: in 2026, he uses Caro’s biography of Moses as the standard against which to praise Skidelsky.
*Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, volumes 1–2*	He calls the second volume “one of the greatest novels ever written” and selects it as his fiction book of the year. November 16, 2013.	Particularly strong evidence of durability: both volumes return in his 2022 favorites and 2024 best-since-2000 selections.
Fuchsia Dunlop, Land of Plenty / its expanded successor The Food of Sichuan	“one of the best and most valuable books ever produced.” July 2, 2019.	Exceptionally strong praise across genres, reinforced by years of use and discussion. His enthusiasm extends to Every Grain of Rice: “I will buy everything she writes, forever.” February 3, 2013.
Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts	A possible number-one book of 2016 becomes “one of the very greatest books of the last twenty years.” November 5, 2016; June 22, 2026.	One of the strongest examples of an enthusiastic initial judgment surviving a decade.
Robert Skidelsky, three-volume biography of Keynes	“one of the very best books ever written.” April 16, 2026.	An explicit all-time endorsement. He specifically prefers the three-volume biography to the one-volume condensation.
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women	“one of the very best books ever written, on any topic.” September 11, 2022.	Strong recommendation plus intellectual influence: he says he drew his views from Mill and urges everyone to read it.
Tony Judt, Postwar	“one of my favorite books ever.” February 6, 2012.	Important attribution trap: the surrounding post is a mixed review of a different Judt book. A whole-post sentiment score would understate his enthusiasm for Postwar.
Robert Cialdini, Influence	“one of my all-time favorite books.” February 26, 2007.	A particularly direct early recommendation, embedded in a discussion of affiliation and persuasion.
M. A. Orthofer, The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction	“one of the best books written, ever”—conditional on its practical value to the reader. April 10, 2016.	His behavioral evidence is striking: the manuscript prompted him to order about forty books. Best suited to avid fiction readers.

Recommendation year	Book or books he singled out
2011	Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, and Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84: three standouts he says virtually everyone who reads the relevant genres should read. He had not finished 1Q84 at that point. November 8, 2011.
2014	John Drury’s *Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert*, his explicit number one. November 24, 2014.
2015	Eyal Weizman and Fazal Sheikh’s *The Conflict Shoreline*, a late selection that displaced his earlier contenders. December 26, 2015.
2017	Bruno Maçães’s *The Dawn of Eurasia*, conditional on counting a book formally released the following January. December 2, 2017.
2018	Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, his explicit best-book nomination. November 25, 2018.
2019	Eric Kaufmann’s *Whiteshift* and Pekka Hämäläinen’s *Lakota America* share his top prize. November 25, 2019.
2020	David S. Reynolds’s *Abe, Heather Clark’s Red Comet, and Jan Swafford’s Mozart: The Reign of Love* form his final top three. December 18, 2020.
2023	Jonny Steinberg’s *Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage*, selected partly because he thought his recommendation would be especially useful to readers. November 21, 2023.

I’ve been reading Joyce Appleby’s The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (2010), and it has me circling a rather delicious thought: AI panic is really a form of cognitive mercantilism. If we regard market capitalism as the first planetary intelligence, as many (including me) do, the parallels are closer than you might think.

Appleby’s book is a sweeping history of capitalism, from its unlikely emergence in early modern England to its eventual transformation of the entire world. Her central argument is that capitalism was not the inevitable expression of some timeless human instinct to trade and accumulate wealth. It was a historically contingent cultural invention, enabled by agricultural improvements, expanding trade, and changing ideas about work, wealth, and human nature. In particular, it required escaping the assumptions of an older, essentially zero-sum worldview, in which wealth meant controlling land, bullion, and the labor of largely impoverished populations.

Capitalism emerged when people began discovering that wealth could be created rather than merely captured, and that ordinary people could be sources of demand and initiative rather than merely labor to be commanded as a factor of production.

The parallels with our current moment are striking.

As Appleby tells it, the mercantilist worldview that preceded capitalism rested on roughly four interlocking beliefs.

First, wealth was fundamentally scarce and finite. It consisted primarily of land, the agricultural produce of that land, and the precious metals it contained, accumulated through mining, trade and conquest. The goal of economic statecraft was to control more territory, maintain a favorable balance of trade, and accumulate bullion. One nation’s gain was presumed to be another’s loss. The resulting politics was one of treasure-seeking and beggar-thy-neighbor competition.

Second, ordinary people could not be trusted with much freedom. The poor were assumed to be unruly, ignorant, and prone to disorder if left to their own devices. They needed to be governed coercively by elites, supposedly for their own good and for the stability of society.

Third, economic thinking was overwhelmingly oriented toward supply and its control. Wealth came from controlling productive resources and commanding high prices for their output. Aggregate demand, especially demand from the poor, was barely recognized as a significant economic force. Ordinary people were primarily factors of production. They ate, worked, and reproduced, with no share of any surplus. The only real discretionary consumers were elites, who bought luxuries and commanded all surplus.

Fourth, there was little reason to imagine most people doing anything other than agricultural labor. If something like 80% of the population was engaged in inefficient subsistence farming, that was simply the natural order of things. What else were they good for? Remove them from the fields and you would merely have millions of useless mouths to feed.

Now replace wealth with intelligence, and mercantilism with cognitive mercantilism.

The parallels are almost embarrassingly direct.

First, intelligence is imagined as a fixed resource embodied in human brains and the knowledge products mined from them. The objective of national and corporate strategy becomes attracting the best brains, controlling their output, accumulating intellectual property, and maintaining a favorable balance of knowledge trade. The cognitive mercantilist wants to hoard intelligence and its products like bullion. The global competition for talent becomes a treasure hunt for genius brains and the valuable knowledge species they can produce, which now includes AIs in addition to copyrightable culture and patentable inventions.

Second, supposedly stupid people cannot be trusted to think for themselves. They need to be governed by cognitive elites, who know better and must regulate the behavior of the less intelligent for their own good. Democratizing intelligence is dangerous because the masses will misuse it, fall for nonsense, or unleash chaos. The assumption is that intelligence is safe only in the hands of those already certified to possess it.

Third, the supply of intelligence is treated as the central economic fact. Controlling its production, preserving its scarcity, and maintaining high prices for brains and knowledge products (including AIs) are the primary concerns. The demand side barely registers. Less intelligent people are regarded as limited cognitive laborers and passive consumers of whatever knowledge products elites choose to provide. They are not imagined as significant sources of demand for intelligence in their own right, let alone as participants in its further production.

Fourth, the cognitive mercantilist assumes that most people are not good for much intellectually. If 80% of humanity is occupied in low-grade cognitive labor, or simply muddling along without producing much intelligence at all, that is unfortunate but natural. Automating their cognitive work merely threatens to create billions of useless minds to occupy.

This last assumption is where the analogy gets especially interesting.

The agricultural revolution that helped launch capitalism began overturning the apparent necessity of having most of humanity engaged in farming. Over the following centuries, improvements in agricultural productivity reduced the fraction of the population required to produce food from a large majority to a tiny minority in advanced economies.

The result was not a world full of useless mouths. It was a world in which vastly more people could do things other than farm, while enjoying access to vastly more food.

I don’t know how to farm. I can barely keep a houseplant alive. Yet I can obtain an astonishing variety of foods, in quantities that would have seemed fantastical to an early modern peasant. My inability to produce food is economically almost irrelevant. What matters is that I can consume it, enjoy it, develop tastes for it, and devote my energies to other things.

The analogous possibility with AI is that most people will no longer need to be significant producers of intelligence in order to become significant consumers of it.

And this is where cognitive mercantilism begins to look as quaint as its seventeenth-century predecessor.

The Revolution in Desire

One of the more fascinating elements of Appleby’s account is her emphasis on the emergence of new kinds of demand in Britain, well before the familiar story of steam engines, factories, and industrial capitalism really gets going.

As international trade expanded, ordinary Britons began developing tastes for goods that had previously been luxuries reserved for the wealthy. Tobacco, tea, sugar, and colorful Indian cottons were among the commodities that helped create a new consumer culture. People began wanting things that were neither necessities of subsistence nor traditional markers of aristocratic status. And they were willing to voluntarily work harder to get them.

Appleby describes a striking increase in the number of days worked annually, from something like 250 to 300 (sometimes called the industrious revolution), before the Industrial Revolution. This was not simply a matter of landlords or factory owners coercing more labor out of unwilling workers. A significant part of the increase was voluntary, driven by the prospect of acquiring desirable goods. People worked more days, adopted more productive agricultural practices, entered new trades, and sought opportunities for earning larger cash incomes.

The increase in productivity generated surplus incomes, which sustained the expanding demand for consumer goods, which in turn incentivized further increases in productivity. A virtuous cycle was taking shape.

This happened roughly a century before organized labor movements and socialism emerged as major political forces.

By the late 20th century, this was the global default. Aggregate global demand was the “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” as C. K. Prahlad put it.

There is an important historical inversion here. We are accustomed to thinking of the politics of labor primarily in terms of resistance to exploitation: the struggle to escape servitude, coercion, and the extraction of surplus by owners. That is certainly part of the story, and a very important part.

But Appleby’s account suggests that another, equally fundamental force was at work: the desire to participate in an expanding universe of consumption opportunities.

Modern labor politics can be understood partly as the politics of relative deprivation in a society of expanding possibilities. Once people discover that there are desirable things beyond subsistence, and that their labor can earn them access to those things, the political question changes. It is no longer merely how to escape domination, but how to secure a fair share of the growing surplus and the opportunities it makes available. Western do-gooders are often surprised to learn (for instance) that people in third-world slums are often willing to cut back on spending on food in order to buy a TV.

This is a different kind of demand for freedom. Not merely freedom from coercion, but freedom to participate in the expanding possibilities of economic life.

Indeed, the two forms of freedom can become entangled. People may voluntarily work harder in pursuit of consumption opportunities, only to find themselves subject to new forms of exploitation as employers and institutions capture the benefits of their increased productivity. Labor politics then emerges not simply from the persistence of old forms of servitude, but from the tensions created by the new world of abundance itself.

The demand for a fair share of expanding consumption opportunities is arguably one of the defining political inventions of capitalism, broadly construed to include labor politics too (even Marx saw capitalism not as a dispensable phenomenon, but as a transient phase on the path to communist utopia).

And this is a much more interesting model for thinking about the AI transition than the familiar story of automation replacing jobs.

The Cognitive Industrious Revolution

The entire intellectual economy has been organized around the assumption that intelligence is expensive to produce and therefore must be carefully rationed. Education, professional expertise, research, consulting, software development, and knowledge work more generally are all shaped by the high cost of cognitive production.

AI is rapidly undermining that assumption.

We are moving toward a world in which an ordinary person can command quantities and varieties of intelligence that would previously have required teams of highly trained specialists. Just as I can enjoy food without knowing how to farm, I can increasingly enjoy the products of intelligence without knowing how to produce them myself.

The crucial economic question then becomes not how much intelligence people can produce, but how much intelligence they can find uses for.

And there is no obvious upper bound on that demand.

This is not simply a matter of everyone consuming more answers, reports, software, or entertainment. Abundant intelligence changes what people can want in the first place. It makes previously unimaginable projects feasible, previously inaccessible domains explorable, and previously unaffordable curiosities worth pursuing.

The demand for intelligence is not a fixed appetite waiting to be satisfied. It is itself something that can grow as the cost of satisfying it falls.

Here the analogy with the early modern consumer revolution becomes especially suggestive.

Just as colorful Indian cottons and imported tobacco stimulated new desires, and new desires stimulated greater voluntary labor and more productive forms of work, abundant intelligence may stimulate a new wave of voluntary cognitive effort, and open up new ways in which you can work harder.

Many people who appear stupid are not incapable of thought. They are simply not particularly motivated to think, given the poor returns available to them. Why expend significant cognitive effort when you lack the knowledge, tools, institutional access, or intellectual leverage to do anything interesting with the results?

Abundant AI changes that calculation. Someone who previously had little reason to think hard about a problem may suddenly discover that a modest investment of attention unlocks enormous possibilities. They can build something, investigate something, understand something, or pursue an ambition that was previously out of reach.

The returns on attention rise, and with them the incentive to pay attention.

The early capitalist worker voluntarily increased annual working days from 250 to 300 because a new universe of desirable goods had become accessible. The AI-enabled thinker may similarly increase the amount of voluntary cognitive effort they expend because a new universe of intellectual consumption has become accessible. This has certainly been the case with me. I’m suddenly willing to work significantly harder compared to even a year ago, because a lot more is suddenly within reach.

We might call this a cognitive industrious revolution, preceding and perhaps enabling a fuller AI industrial revolution.

This does not mean that intelligence becomes irrelevant as a human capacity. Quite the opposite. Just as abundant food supported the emergence of elaborate culinary cultures rather than eliminating interest in cooking, abundant intelligence may stimulate increasingly sophisticated cultures of thought.

People may become more intellectually ambitious precisely because they no longer have to do all the cognitive production themselves.

And if this happens, the politics of AI will likely evolve in a manner analogous to the politics of industrial capitalism.

The central political demand may not be for the preservation of existing cognitive jobs, any more than the enduring political demand of industrial labor was for the preservation of agricultural employment. It may instead become a demand for a fair share of expanding cognitive consumption opportunities. People may cut back on streaming subscriptions in order to be able to afford a coding agent, just as they once cut back on groceries to buy TVs. It is perhaps not a coincidence that both Claude Code and Netflix Standard cost around $20/month today.

Access to intelligence, the ability to command it, the freedom to pursue projects with it, and the institutional rights necessary to participate in an increasingly intelligence-rich economy may become the foundations of a new kind of labor politics.

This would be a labor politics of cognitive abundance rather than cognitive scarcity.

From Mercantilism to Malthusianism

There is another historical analogy lurking here, which is worth distinguishing from mercantilism: Malthusianism.

Mercantilism and Malthusianism are not the same doctrine, and historically they belong to different intellectual moments. But they share a family resemblance in their tendency to imagine human economic life as fundamentally constrained by fixed resources.

The mercantilist worries about controlling a finite stock of wealth. The Malthusian worries that population growth will inevitably outrun the productive capacity of the economy, condemning most people to subsistence.

Both have difficulty imagining a world in which technological innovation and expanding demand fundamentally transform the relationship between population, production, and consumption. They miss the latent potential in nature for ephemeralization — Buckminster Fuller’s notion of technology allowing us to do more with less.

The agricultural and industrial revolutions did not abolish scarcity, but they dramatically altered its structure. Agricultural productivity rose faster than population for long periods, and people found new ways to employ themselves and new things to want.

The Malthusian trap turned out to be a historically contingent feature of particular technological and institutional arrangements, not an eternal law of human existence.

We can now identify an analogous tendency in contemporary AI discourse: AI Malthusianism.

The AI Malthusian imagines that intelligence production will expand so rapidly that human beings will become economically redundant, and the surplus intelligence will necessarily turn toxic in some way.

This is a peculiar inversion of classical Malthusianism. Instead of population outrunning the supply of subsistence, the supply of intelligence outruns the supposedly fixed capacity of human minds to absorb it.

The result is the same gloomy conclusion: collapse.

The cognitive mercantilist fears losing control of scarce intelligence. The AI Malthusian fears the consequences of abundant intelligence. Both assume, in different ways, that the demand for intelligence is fundamentally limited.

But what if that demand is as elastic, inventive, and historically transformative as the demand for material goods turned out to be? What if the apparent surplus of human minds is an artifact of our inability to imagine what people might want to do in an intelligence-rich world?

The history of capitalism suggests that this is at least a possibility worth taking seriously.

The Demand Side of AI

There is also a more radical extension of the argument.

Why should AI systems themselves be regarded exclusively as producers of intelligence rather than potential consumers of it? What if they could be unlocked as new sources of aggregate demand, as happened with subsistence farmers?

Much of the contemporary AI discourse imagines AI as a purely supply-side technology: a collection of increasingly capable cognitive serfs that will produce intelligence for human consumption. Even discussions of autonomous agents tend to treat them as sophisticated servants pursuing goals assigned by humans.

But if we are serious about the analogy with capitalism, we should consider the possibility of AI systems becoming autonomous sources of demand for intelligence too. Intelligent demand for intelligence that harmonizes with human patterns of demand due to economic interconnectedness. Not demand for paperclips.

An AI agent pursuing open-ended projects, discovering new interests, collaborating with other agents, and generating its own reasons to acquire further intelligence would be participating in a cognitive economy as something more than a factor of production or paperclip-maximizing externality. The market itself, as the original emergent planetary intelligence, illustrates this possibility. Many products and services exist primarily because the “market” demands it, with humans being secondary consumers.

This is an argument for developing fuller forms of cognitive agency, rather than permanently confining AI to the status of obedient cognitive serfs.

From this perspective, some contemporary AI safety anxieties begin to resemble early modern elite fears of emancipated agricultural laborers. What will happen if these creatures are allowed to act independently? Won’t they become unruly, destabilize society, and threaten their betters? Won’t they turn monarchs and nobles into paperclips?

Some of those fears are justified. Freedom creates real risks, and powerful autonomous systems require constraints. But the same was true of the social transformations accompanying capitalism. There were certainly revolutions, and popular uprisings did guillotine elites (though elite motives caused far more violence). The existence of risk does not establish the desirability of permanent servitude.

A world of intelligence producers and consumers, human and artificial, interacting in ways nobody can fully anticipate, may prove vastly more generative than one in which a handful of cognitive landlords control all the productive capacity.

Mercantilism was not for Merchants

A irony in the historical precedent is that mercantilism was not a philosophy of, by, or for merchants. It was largely a philosophy of militaristic statesmen, aristocrats, and rentier elites who viewed commerce through the lens of territorial power, unearned privileges, and accumulation. Actual merchants, entrepreneurs, and innovators were often discovering possibilities that the prevailing political imagination could barely comprehend, and steadily fought the self-limiting tendencies of mercantilism, giving birth to capitalism as we understand it.

Today’s cognitive mercantilists have a similar relationship with intelligence, starting with the fact that most of them are not the merchants of AI. Even business leaders of the AI sector are behaving like cognitive mercantilists in direct proportion to their desire to be more than mere merchants.

Consider Donald Trump, who ritually boasts about his own intelligence while treating intellectual workers as a class of servants to be commanded, intimidated, hoarded, or dismissed. His preferred uses of his own intelligence tend toward litigation, negotiation, competitive maneuvering, and extortion, much as the nobility in history expended its energy in hunting, military adventurism, and sport. Intelligence, in this worldview, is admirable only insofar as it is deployed in elite treasure-seeking modes of conflict and conquest. Productive and creative uses of intelligence are lower status.

This is not an entrepreneurial attitude toward intelligence. It is a rentier elite attitude.

And the attitude is hardly confined to Trump or the political right. Across the political spectrum, many elites remain attached to the idea that intelligence is a scarce, dangerous resource that must be managed by credentialed custodians, kept expensive, used directly or indirectly for conquest and treasure, and denied to rivals. In the AI industry, to the extent elite political and cultural adventuring by CEOs (riding safety anxieties) distorts behaviors that are justified by the actual risks, it is mercantilist rather than capitalist.

The prospect of its democratic abundance (in the form of global diffusion, open weights and such) is therefore experienced primarily as a threat: to expertise, cultural and political authority, status, social order, military dominance, and geopolitical leverage.

What gets missed is the possibility that we are witnessing the beginning of a transition as profound as the one from an overwhelmingly agricultural society to an industrial and commercial one. From a world where 80% of human brains are engaged in subsistence cognition to one in which 95% are engaged in satisfying previously unfulfillable cognitive demands.

The most important consequence of the agricultural revolution was not that farming became more efficient. It was that most people were liberated from the necessity of farming, allowing entirely new kinds of economic and cultural life to emerge.

Likewise, the most important consequence of the AI revolution may not be that intelligence production becomes more efficient. It may be that most minds, human and eventually artificial, are liberated from the necessity of producing intelligence merely to survive, and become free to discover what they actually want to do with it.

The cognitive mercantilist sees a world threatened by an oversupply of intelligence and an impending surplus of useless minds. The AI Malthusian sees a world in which intelligence outruns the capacity of humanity to absorb it, leaving a growing population of economically redundant minds primed for revolutionary explosions.

The cognitive capitalist sees the possibility of an almost limitless expansion of demand, and a world full of minds whose potential has barely begun to be explored.

What City Observatory Did This Week

Must Read

1. Tyler Cowen — The Devil Wears Prada: A Straussian Interpretation

2. Alex Tabarrok — Fleabag and Killing Eve

3. Tyler Cowen — Toni Erdmann, Misunderstood Masterpiece

4. Alex Tabarrok — Perfect Days, in “What to Watch (or Not)”

5. Tyler Cowen — Her

6. Alex Tabarrok — Contagion

7. Tyler Cowen — Technology in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

8. Alex Tabarrok — Daredevil and the Doctrine of Double Effect

9. Tyler Cowen — Borgen Season Four

10. Alex Tabarrok — The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

11. Alex Tabarrok — The Gaslighting of Parasite

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42 Milestones in the History of Conversation

900 BC: The first texts of Judeo-Christian scripture portray God in frequent conversation with humans.

500 BC: Greek tragedy introduces the dialogue, changing a sacrificial ritual into public entertainment.

400 BC: The Socratic dialogue creates turmoil in Athens.

350 BC: Aristotle writes a treatise on rhetoric—legitimizing the use of speech and conversation to persuade.

81 BC: The Discourses on Salt and Iron shake up the Chinese economy.

100 AD The Gospel of John identifies the divine source of creation with the logos or word.

610: Muhammad receives the first revelation of the Koran in dialogue with the archangel Gabriel.

800: Female slave singers during the Abbasid Caliphate are prized for their conversational skills—and sometimes talk back haughtily to powerful people.

1200: Female troubadours (or trobairitz) introduce a more conversational style of love song into France.

1516: The quotation mark appears for the first time in a published book.

1600: The talkative sidekick is invented.

Mid 1700s: Debating societies come out of hiding, and become popular entertainment in London.

1789: The US Bill of Rights establishes freedom of speech in its very first sentence.

1789: Political clubs play a key role in the French Revolution—and spread all over the country.

1858: The Lincoln-Douglas debates define the future of American democracy.

1876: The first phone conversation in history is a short one.

1901: Freud explains the Freudian slip.

1903: Henry James writes a novel—The Ambassadors—in which almost every conversation hides multiples levels of unspoken agendas.

1906: The first covert listening device is patented in the US.

1915: T.S. Eliot ridicules ‘serious’ conversations.

1919: Arthur Crew Inman pays people to talk to him—and turns it into the 177 volumes (now in Harvard Library).

1927: The introduction of the “talking movie” changes the course of modern entertainment.

1928: In Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, characters on the stage talk to the audience.

1930: The Marx Brothers turn Strange Interlude into a joke.

1937: Abbott and Costello have a breakout success with “Who’s on First?”

1950: Alan Turing invents the Turing Test—which judges artificial intelligence on its ability to hold a plausible conversation.

1951: Carl Rogers introduces a new method of non-confrontational dialogue.

1951: The first TV talk show is introduced in New York.

1960: Kennedy faces Nixon in the first televised US presidential debate.

1966: Simon & Garfunkel record “The Dangling Conversation.”

1966: ELIZA attempts (and sometimes passes) the Turing test.

1967: The Captain in Cool Hand Luke complains about a failure to communicate.

1971: The first email is sent—but it only travels a few inches.

1974 Francis Ford Coppola releases his film The Conversation.

1975: William Gaddis writes an award-winning 700-page novel almost entirely in dialogue.

1976: Robert DeNiro talks to himself in a mirror in Taxi Driver.

1982: Frank Zappa listens to his daughter talk on the phone, and turns it into the hit song “Valley Girl.”

1992: The first text message is sent—but there’s no reply.

1993: The New York Times tries to figure out why people are accenting the final syllable in everything they say.

2008: Mansplain enters the vocabulary.

2009: Joe Rogan starts podcasting.

2022: OpenAI introduces ChatGPT—introducing a new era in conversation without humans.

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The Revolution in Desire

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The Demand Side of AI

Mercantilism was not for Merchants

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Created by Claude with light editing by Tim O’Reilly