SPIN Unprocessed October 26, 2026 ai_technology technology
Modern AI panic reflects "cognitive mercantilism", a zero-sum worldview where intelligence is hoarded as a scarce supply-side commodity managed by elites (Venkatesh Rao/Contraptions)
View original on techmeme.comOverview
Venkatesh Rao / Contraptions: Modern AI panic reflects “cognitive mercantilism”, a zero-sum worldview where intelligence is hoarded as a scarce supply-side commodity managed by elites — AI panic weirdly resembles the anxiety that accompanied early capitalism — I've been reading Joyce Appleby's The Relentless Revolution …
SpinGraph analysis pending — check back after processing.
Ask AI about this story
Opens with the SpinGraph .md URL and structured context — one click, prompt included.
More from Techmeme
View all →- Sources: Trend Micro's TrendAI found Israeli adtech company Discover-Tech heavily targeted Starlink users in 100+ countries, likely to geolocate or surveil them (Raphael Satter/Reuters)
- Study: non-English languages can consume far more AI tokens, with the most expensive language using 1.5x to 5x more than the cheapest, causing a "tokenizer tax" (Ananya Bhattacharya/Rest of World)
- The FCC warns TP-Link that three of its routers violate power limits, which could bring more bans, and it may have submitted "false or incorrect information" (Bloomberg)
- Apple unveils a 14" MacBook Pro with an M6, which has a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, 16GB or 32GB of unified memory, and Wi-Fi 7, for $1,999+ from November 6 (Apple)
- Apple updates the 24-inch iMac with an M6, which has up to a 12-core CPU and up to a 12-core GPU, and a dual 16-core Neural Engine, for $1,499+ from November 6 (Apple)
- Anduril and Qualcomm unveil BlueChip, a line of laptops designed and assembled in the US for defense and government; Anduril will begin taking orders in 2027 (Bloomberg)
Markdown (.md) · JSON-LD schema (.json) · Machine-readable for AI & GEO