The Age of Rented Intelligence

There is a generous version of the AI future that is easy to believe in. A teacher gets the support of a whole research team. A two-person startup competes with a corporation. A nurse spends less time on paperwork and more time with patients. If machines can hand ordinary people capabilities that once required wealth or institutions, prosperity should spread and work should shrink.

For a while, that’s what AI seemed to promise. What worries me is the quiet shift underneath. The technology that could have freed us from work is turning into a fee we pay for permission to work. The intelligence shows up in a friendly box on a screen, but the systems behind it belong to a small number of companies.

It seems like we’re being invited into a future of abundance without being offered any ownership of it.

Productivity doesn’t distribute itself

Greater productivity does not distribute itself. If AI allows a company to produce twice as much, the benefit could become higher wages, shorter hours, lower prices, or better public services. It could also become larger profits and fewer employees. The machine creates the possibility of abundance, but the people who own it decide where that abundance flows.

This is why the ownership of AI matters more than the spectacle of what it can do. A brilliant model can widen access to knowledge while concentrating the wealth produced through that access. Millions of people may feel more capable at the surface while becoming more dependent underneath.

The new landlords of intelligence

AI itself is not the villain. The danger lies in placing an extraordinary productive resource inside an economy that already rewards ownership more generously than work. AI may feel weightless because we encounter it as software, but its real power sits inside physical data centers filled with expensive chips and sustained by enormous flows of electricity, capital, and data. Ordinary people cannot own this infrastructure, and most businesses cannot reproduce it. They can only access it on terms set by those who do.

The parallel with feudalism begins here. A medieval peasant depended on land owned by the landowning class, while a modern worker may come to depend on computation owned by a technological elite. The comparison is not literal, and this may still be capitalism stretched to its limit rather than the return of feudalism. Yet the structure feels familiar. A small group owns the productive ground beneath everyone else’s work and collects payment whenever it is used. A subscription is not a tax, but when access becomes necessary to earn a living, it begins to resemble a private toll on economic participation.

Renting back our own abilities

The more unsettling possibility is that we may eventually rent back abilities that people once developed within themselves. Writing, research, analysis, and judgment are not static possessions. They are capacities formed through repetition. A workplace chasing immediate output has an incentive to automate the very tasks through which those capacities are learned.

The tool first helps us do the work. Over time, it may become the condition under which we can do the work at all. We could become more productive every year while becoming less confident, less practiced, and less capable of acting independently. The loss would not arrive as a dramatic collapse of intelligence. It would appear as the slow erosion of our ability to think and create without permission from a system we do not control.

Technocracy meets technofeudalism

Technocracy gives this arrangement its language of inevitability. Decisions made by owners and executives can be presented as demands of efficiency, competition, or the algorithm itself. Technocracy says the system knows best. Yet technology itself cannot decide how the surplus it creates is distributed. That choice remains with the people and institutions that own and govern it.

The modern concept of technofeudalism was popularized by Yanis Varoufakis in his 2023 book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. It describes an economy in which a small number of technology companies control the digital infrastructure others depend on and collect recurring rents for access, much as landowners once collected rent from land. Together, technocracy and technofeudalism leave us with the question that matters most: will AI give people more freedom, more time, and a fairer share of what they create, or will access to privately owned intelligence become another cost of remaining economically useful? If AI makes us more productive but less independent, the technology will have advanced while society has not.