Unfortunately, AI Might Be Turning Us Into Peasants

To understand techno-feudalism, the first step is to understand regular feudalism.

Economically speaking, feudalism is really just a system, the same as capitalism, socialism, and communism.

Now, it's worth noting that some of these systems, in particular feudalism and communism, but to be honest, arguably all of them, also come with prescriptions for societal hierarchies and political management on top of just their ideas about how to run an economy.

Here, of course, we will primarily be focusing on the economics, but that is still important to keep in mind.

So economically, these systems are all just procedures for answering the central economic questions.

What should be produced? How much should be produced? How should we produce it? And who should it be produced for? Socialism would say from all according to their ability to each according to their need.

Where capitalism would answer, we should produce what the market demands in the quantity that it demands it in the most competitive way possible for the people who have the willingness and ability to demand those goods in that market.

Feudalism is a little bit different again.

Feudalism was most dominant in the time where economics was almost entirely dominated by the productivity of land.

The more land an empire had, the more people it could feed, the bigger armies it could raise, and the more land it could conquer.

So managing who protected, worked, and benefited from that land was extremely important.

There were, of course, minor differences between the mostly medieval European empires implementing this system, but the basic gist was this: The crown would own the land within their empire.

They would then distribute parcels of that land to be managed and defended by lords, who would in turn often subcontract that defense and management obligation down to local knight-