11 March 2026 · LinkedIn
We've been having the same argument about what society is for since the Enlightenment. I think AI has ended our ability to keep deferring it.
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In the late 1600s, John Locke argued that government exists to protect individual rights – life, liberty, property. It serves the individual. Nearly a century later, Rousseau reached the opposite conclusion: that true political legitimacy comes from the general will, the collective good. The individual exists to serve the community.
These aren't minor differences in emphasis. Locke's property rights became the bedrock of capitalism. Rousseau's suspicion of property as the root of inequality became the seed of socialism. The entire left-right political spectrum of the modern world is, at its core, Locke versus Rousseau: the same argument, in different clothes, for three centuries.
We’ve deferred it through distraction – common enemies, wars, the urgencies of each era. What made it workable was a collective story: the global market appeared to be a shared project, but it was always a patchwork of different answers, held together by mutual self-interest rather than shared values. We've seen it fraying with events the past decade.
AI changes that, because AI is the first technology genuinely asymmetrical at this scale. Its impact will touch every sector, every workforce, every individual on the planet. The capability to build it sits in the hands of a small number of companies in a small number of countries.
So the question of who benefits isn't abstract anymore. Should the investors who built it capture the value? The Lockean answer says yes – that's how you incentivise the next wave. Should the gains be distributed to the workforces and societies the technology displaces? The Rousseauian answer says that's the only outcome with any legitimacy.
The world has a default answer, and it's Lockean. Shareholders benefit from efficiency gains. Headcount falls. Margins improve. That's how capital markets work, and capital markets are currently the primary mechanism deciding how AI gets deployed.
What concerns me is where that default leads if nobody consciously overrides it. Capitalism runs on consumers consuming. The productivity gains from AI are being used to reduce the number of people who can afford to consume. It's a system following its own incentives toward a conclusion nobody designed and nobody appears to be steering away from.
At Davos in January, Mark Carney told assembled world leaders that the old order – the rules-based international framework since 1945 – was dead. I fear he might be right. But the deeper fracture isn't geopolitical. It's this one. The Locke-Rousseau argument that has never been settled, inherited now by a generation with more information and connectivity than any before it, and far less time to defer the answer.
AI didn't create this question. It just made avoidance impossible.
What does a society that resolves this well actually look like – and who gets to decide?
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