Cognitive mercantilism: How AI fears reproduce ancient scarcity myths?

An in-depth reading of the history of economic transformations shows that the panic surrounding the rise of AI models is not an isolated phenomenon; it reproduces the anxiety that accompanied the early stages of modern capitalism. In a retrospective reading of historian Joyce Appleby’s thesis in her book *The Unquiet Revolution: A History of Capitalism*, researcher Vinkatesh Rao disassembles the roots of this fear as a pattern of “cognitive mercantilism,” a doctrine that treats intelligence as a closed, finite resource that must be monopolised and guarded from the public.

Traditional mercantilism, founded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rested on four solid pillars: the assumption that wealth is a scarce, limited resource confined to gold and land; the elite belief that the masses cannot be trusted with liberty and must be directed coercively; an absolute focus on controlling supply while ignoring popular demand; and the conviction that keeping eighty percent of people in subsistence farming is the natural order, lest they become idle mouths. Today this system has migrated to the digital sphere, where intelligence is treated as a fixed mass stored in the minds of geniuses and patents, and the widespread availability of its tools is seen as a danger that could unleash chaotic knowledge.

Disassembling the myth of idle mouths represents the most evident historical hinge in this approach;The agricultural breakthrough that paved the way for capitalism did not push farmers into permanent unemployment when their share fell to a tiny minority; instead it enabled the majority to consume food and direct energy toward new productive pathways. Likewise, the automation of cognitive work does not mean creating billions of disabled minds, but opens the door for individuals to shift from producers burdened by the cost of complex thinking to consumers of intelligence, able to deploy it in projects that were previously out of reach because of the high cost of consulting and programming.

British historical records indicate that the period preceding the Industrial Revolution was built on a voluntary effort revolution that raised the annual working days from roughly 250 to 300, driven by ordinary people's desire to acquire goods that had been the exclusive domain of the nobility, such as tobacco, tea, and coloured cotton fabrics. This consumption-driven explosion created a feedback loop that spurred productivity and expanded the economy. In the same vein, artificial intelligence prepares the ground for a new cognitive effort revolution; as the cost of accessing organised understanding falls, the real return on human attention rises, encouraging individuals to exert voluntary mental effort to explore horizons and projects that were not viable under the previous scarcity of knowledge resources.

For institutions and firms in the Gulf, Egypt, and the Arab East, this analysis shifts the battle from elite capture to engineering demand channels. As long as regional strategies drain their budgets on mimicking mercantile monopoly by stockpiling rare talent or importing closed proprietary systems, the real transformation lies in empowering operational teams and middle-level staff to consume intelligence abundantly in order to address daily frictions in services, logistics, and institutional development. The successful bet is no longer protecting offices from automation, but redesigning tasks so that each employee finds an immediate incentive to harness that knowledge abundance to broaden what they can accomplish directly.

The shift from a logic of guarding to a space of abundance requires abandoning the fear of surplus minds; when intelligence moves from an elite privilege to an affordable consumable resource, it does not eliminate human thought, but raises the ceiling of intellectual ambition and unleashes a broad wave of individual and institutional initiatives.