The Intelligence Curse

The Intelligence Curse is an essay series by Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine that warns of a post-AGI world where powerful actors—states, companies, and elites—lose incentives to invest in regular people, as AI replaces human labor and economic value shifts to non-human resources like land, energy, and compute.

Drawing parallels to the resource curse in rentier states, it argues this could lead to mass disempowerment, frozen power structures, and societal instability unless countered by strategies like open-source AI, data control, and diffusion of intelligence.

The series proposes paths to break the curse through deliberate policy and technological choices to maintain human relevance.