The Last Gold Rush: AI and the New Mercantilism
As AI revolutionizes the ‘mining’ of ideas, the winners will be those with the biggest mines
By Jack Kieffaber and Garrett Maxwell
There is no such thing as creativity; there’s only recombination of what already exists. And the number of possible recombinations, though vast, is not infinite. On that view, any so-called creative task—writing a song, inking a patent, devising a business—is not an intimate conversation with one’s muse. It’s wildcatting for oil. It’s strip mining.
The mine is the collective, finite repository of ideas that work, that sell, that succeed. And, until now, a billion individual artists have been chipping away at that mine with a billion individual shovels. But artificial intelligence is the invention of dynamite—if not the hydrogen bomb. Soon you’ll ask AI to write you all the songs that haven’t been written yet. Or all the movies that haven’t been scripted yet. Or all the lawsuits that haven’t been filed yet. And it’ll start doing it. With a training repository of all human preferences, it will start sifting through those tranches of sediment and picking out the diamonds.
The artist may well prove a casualty when moguls cut out the middleman and start wildcatting for ideas themselves. But there’s a deeper casualty that’s even more inevitable: capitalism.
Now, put down the lighter fluid—this isn’t another millennial socialist screed. For once, the capitalism killer won’t be a faculty-lounge moonshot that’s never been tried. Rather, it’ll be something that arguably never died in the first place: mercantilism.
You might have forgotten about mercantilism; even in an era of tariff wars and economic nationalism, you only ever hear its name in whispers. Never mind that it’s what settled the known world—blooming from the Renaissance, carrying Columbus across the Atlantic and settling the Americas in its wake. Never mind that it lasted just as long as what we have now, more or less. Mercantilism remains a dirty word because it’s all but synonymous with another—imperialism—which is synonymous with Leopold and the slave trade and the root of all things now dubbed “systemic.” And I’m not going to pretend that’s irrelevant. But I’m going to use the dirty word anyway. What follows is not normative, but descriptive.
Mercantilism is the economic view of the world that says there is limited stuff you can have—a finite amount of gold you can mine, of wealth you can accrue, of value in the world. In the mercantilist view, it is entirely possible for one guy to own everything that exists. And the basic telos mercantilism preaches is: Be that guy. All that matters is having the most stuff because the person with the most stuff wins. And the prize is a life spent fighting off everybody else as they try to take it.
Capitalism’s revolutionary rebuttal isn’t that there’s infinite stuff; hardly anyone is quite that naive. Rather, its rebuttal is that finite stuff can yield infinite growth—such that our ceiling is continually rising as human creativity finds better and better ways to do more with less. It’s the happy enlightenment that’s come to define the romantic west: Stuff runs out, but ideas don’t.
That philosophy is empirically wrong. Ideas are simply not infinite; there is X huge number of things in the universe and Y huger number of ways you can combine and wield them. But, as with chess positions and atoms, these huge numbers are still numbers. And more vitally, what is the number of combinations and uses that are actually valuable? The ones that work, that people will actually pay for? It’s the same as the number of chess moves that actually win: something much smaller than the total number of possibilities. Mercantilism didn’t care how many cockroaches were in the world; it cared how much gold. The good stuff always tends to be more countable in number—and if you can count it, you can hoard it. The mercantilist says you should.
Now, you might say I’m nitpicking the capitalists here. After all, some numbers are so big that they are basically infinity—and the number of profitable ideas in the world is probably one of them. That seemingly infinite amount of opportunity is like a fog that has descended over a room such that we can’t see everything the room contains—or, indeed, how big the room even is. We can only see what’s immediately around us, and that influences our behavior.
I might find a box of swords next to me and start chasing you down with one. But I’d have to think twice about doing so on the off chance that, while fleeing deeper into the fog, you trip over a crate of assault rifles. Uncertainty becomes a domesticator; better to stay put and creatively maximize what’s around you before striking out in search of more.
That illustration sounds a lot like real life. But we can imagine what would happen if the fog suddenly cleared and you and I were the only two people in the room. And we came to find that the room is a broom closet with three items in it: a gun, a sword and a ham sandwich. At this point, what would we do? Well, you and I could discuss how to properly apportion the sandwich. Heck, maybe we could be creative and use the sword to cut the sandwich.
Or we could scheme behind each other’s backs: “I wonder whether I should grab the gun or the sword?” “Maybe I could kick the sword away and then shoot him when he dives for it.” We could devise nuanced, creative strategies for besting one another and then execute the strategies using our cunning and wiles.
But, of course, none of that is what’s going to happen. What’s going to happen is, I’m going to punch you in the mouth because I’m bigger than you. And then I’m going to grab the gun and the sword. Then I’m going to stab you with my sword. Then I’m going to shoot you with my gun, and then I’m going to eat my sandwich. Capitalism didn’t really get a chance when the fog cleared, did it? The correct, primal urge was pure mercantilism: Me see stuff, me take stuff. How best to use the stuff is a question much better contemplated after you have it.
When AI renders the ideascape hyperlegible, the fog clears. It doesn’t clear all at once, but it dissipates—little by little, you can see more. And, as with hyperspectral imaging satellites that x-ray through the ground to spot rich mineral deposits, it’s suddenly no longer about guessing right; it’s about seeing first. And buying first.
This will be the sneaky dynamic of Web 3.0: AI tycoons singing the capitalist lullaby of boundless creativity before erupting in mercantile bursts to capture swaths of intellectual property. And that’s because AI allows idea mining at scale. Wildcatters don’t point to one spot on the ground and say, “That’s where the oil is”—the way novelists do when they commit two years of their life to a single idea. Wildcatters pump every square inch available; if they had the time and resources to pump the entire Earth’s surface, they would. With AI and ideas, they can. “Write me a good short story,” “Write me a winning legal claim” and “Write me a big hit song” are the wildcatter’s prompts of the future. And Musk, the mercantile Leopold, will just keep hitting “enter” as long as the machine will let him.
It’s uncertain how long the machine will take to pump out the whole reservoir. But when you own the reservoir, you own the uncertainty. You own the contents of the undefined set, such that it’s not an uncertainty anymore—it’s an asset. And when creativity itself is the reservoir, we’ll resort to the animal urgency of acquisition; “capitalism” will be a thing that happens within organizations as they pick over the tranches they’ve plundered.
This might all sound hubristic—like a young AI triumphalist shooting off at the mouth about a brave new world without due respect for the old one. But capitalism is the young upstart in this debate; what we’re foretelling is older and more staid. Mercantilism was the king’s first instinct when he saw the new world and new stuff for the first time. Capitalism was what he devised when he’d already plundered his loot and wanted to lull the peons, with fantasies of individualism and Andrew Carnegie, away from trying to take it. But both fall, in time, to the economic system that has outlasted all others: feudalism—that is, mercantilism after everything’s already been grabbed.
Make no mistake, feudalism isn’t an outmoded Dark Ages relic. Rather, it’s the natural state of play when nothing is new—when all the resources are known and predictable and the only asset is the raw power to control them. And it would still be with us today but for that pesky Columbian voyage. The race to plunder that new world, in turn, begat the Enlightenment revelation that yet another new world existed in the mind—in applications of beauty and physics. Never had so much new been put in front of peoples so advanced; what followed was a near-millennium unprecedented in—and unrepresentative of—the standard evolutionary experience.
AI is going to make things more normal—cosmically normal—in that the rich are the strong and they get richer. Because new is dying. In terms of land, it died when we settled California. In terms of resources, it’ll die the day the last drop of oil is pumped. And in terms of creativity, it was never there at all—an illusion wrought from mere recombination of what the mind already holds. If AI turns out to be the long-prophesied technological singularity, it will rapidly allow us to see all the ideas we’ve overlooked—a new new world hiding in the crevices of the old. There’ll be no more fog, and we’ll start grabbing. Because we’ll have to.
I’d close with that dark, lyrical long run if there weren’t a business imperative to be gleaned in the very, very short run: Start grabbing now. If you own a record label, start grabbing up the existing canon of songs while you dispatch your machine to try all the new ones. If you’re in pharma, start screening every possible molecular combination at hyperspeed to find the drugs that work. If you own a business that makes things, start grabbing up patents while you train your machine to spot the good ones and devise its own. And if you own a law firm, start grabbing up facts—colonize occurrences en masse and let your AI drill through them to find the actionable diamonds while dreaming up test cases in its spare time.
And hurry. None of this is a good thing, but I think it may prove the inevitable thing. Because mercantilism itself is fast becoming a bedtime story—and the lords of our day are getting wise to it. It’s already feudal; start grabbing before it’s futile.
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