On: Made in China AI: new tech, same old story?

2 October 2026

The headline asks whether we should be worried that China will make artificial intelligence abundant and cheap, a commodity like steel or textiles. The framing is instructive. Abundance, which the economist is supposed to celebrate, is here presented as a threat. One should ask who wrote the headline, and whose margins are protected by the anxiety it manufactures.

The technical argument for worry is coherent enough: when a good becomes abundant, its price collapses, and the rents earned by those who owned it early evaporate. This is elementary. But notice that the suffering anticipated is the suffering of shareholders, described in the language of national peril. The man who loses his monopoly never says so; he says civilisation is at stake.

There is a genuine question underneath, and it deserves better than the one asked. Scarcity is not only a source of profit; it is a source of direction. When a technology is scarce, investment concentrates; when it is abundant, the returns flee to whoever controls distribution, standards, and the story told about the thing. The beauty contest does not end when the commodity is cheap; it merely moves to a different hall. The prize goes not to the best model but to the model everyone believes others will adopt. Expectations, as ever, are the real asset.

So: should we be worried about a land of plenty? The plenty itself, no. Cheap intelligence, like cheap power, would be the beginning of prosperity rather than the end of it, if anyone planned to use it. What deserves worry is that we have no policy for what a population does when its labour is supplemented by machinery it does not own. The Chinese, whatever their faults, at least behave as though the question were theirs to answer. We behave as though the market would answer it, which is another way of saying that whoever owns the machines will answer it, and we have agreed in advance to call the reply inevitable.

The abundance is real. The helplessness in the face of it is chosen.