How AI Will Make Land More Valuable

The long list of things AI will revolutionize includes, in roughly descending order of importance, childhood, democracy, the internet, chess and how to decide where to go on vacation. Today I would like to write about an area that cuts close to home: economic policy.

To start with a simple framework: Production is the result of a combination of inputs — land, labor, capital and so on. If one of those inputs becomes more plentiful, the others become more scarce, in relative terms, and thus higher in marginal value. Powerful AI makes intelligence, broadly construed, more abundant. That will be good for productivity overall, but other factors will become relatively more scarce.