"The dumbest people on the team" – Emad Mostaque on capability, AI ownership and why you can't rent your cognition

At TechBBQ in Copenhagen I got fifteen minutes with Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI and now CEO of Intelligent Internet. I had planned for an hour, so we moved fast.

We talk about what happens to human capabilities when machines become better than us at the work we built our identities on. Emad explains why he thinks the "intelligence inversion" is arriving sooner than he predicted, why GDP is the wrong instrument for the economy ahead, and why countries and people need to own their AI instead of renting it.

Along the way I unpack the key ideas from his book The Last Economy and his Commonwealth series, including the MIND framework and the concept of "improvement is capture": the idea that every step we hand to the machine can be a genuine improvement, and still leave us with less control. The episode also includes clips from Emad's fireside chat on the TechBBQ stage with Dominic-Madori Davis of TechCrunch.

Show notes

• The Last Economy (free to read): thelasteconomy.com
• The Commonwealth series: cw.ii.inc
• The Last Court: webstatics.ii.inc/microsites/common-wealth/pdfs/the-last-court.pdf
• Intelligent Internet: ii.inc
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Key concepts in the episode:

• The intelligence inversion: the shift where intelligence becomes cheap, abundant and non-human
• MIND: Material, Intelligence, Network and Diversity capital, multiplied rather than added
• Improvement is capture: why a string of genuine improvements can end with power concentrated in fewer hands
• The Champion: Emad's proposal for citizen-owned AI utilities, modelled on how TSMC was founded