Show notes
All factors of production matter. But it is important to understand that their relative importances shifts. While every good Georgist will note that land is essential to all activities, what you do with it, and how you utilise all factors determines success.
Every era has a factor of production that organises the rest. For the agricultural economy it was land, for the industrial economy capital, and for much of the last century labour. The opening episode makes the case that the binding factor has shifted again, to intelligence: the capacity to sense, reason, decide and act well.
We work through where that intelligence actually originates, whether in people, processes, platforms or machines. While AI is the loudest ‘intelligence’ it is not the only form of it. AI presents risks and therefore we must ask what an ethical path forward asks of firms and institutions.
“Intelligence is becoming the factor of production. It differs from all others markedly because it is embodied in people, intellectual property and physical capital, but increasingly it is the ability of knowledge embodied in people that is critical to leverage intelligence embodied in intellectual property and physical infrastructure assets”
— Dr. Michael D’Rosario
