Free Markets as Driverless Superintelligence

A Unified Theory of Specialization, Markets and Intelligence

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’”

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Genesis 3:2-5

Free markets are a form of driverless superintelligence.

The market is a vast Mixture of Experts - 8 billion biological human experts, routing resources and attention through price signals and capital flows.

Free markets aren't just economic systems. They are living, breathing superintelligent organisms. And no one human is in control.

This is not a metaphor.

This is not an analogy.

This is reality.

The Architecture Of Intelligence Is Universal

Markets are the first form of emergent, driverless intelligence.

We - the mutant apes - have unlocked recursive self-improvement.

Think about the economy like an AI researcher would a neural network.

Mixture of Experts (MoE) is an AI model architecture that selectively activates different specialized parts of the neural network based on the input. MoE is AI with labor specialization. The market does exactly this, but at planetary scale.

Researchers didn't invent MoE; they discovered it. In the multiverse of possible AI designs, it emerged victorious because it produces more intelligence per watt than the alternatives.

Adam Smith Was An AI researcher.

When Adam Smith described the division of labor in his pin factory, he wasn't just explaining manufacturing efficiency—he was documenting a human-scale Mixture of Experts system in action. The invisible hand doesn't just allocate resources; it routes cognitive tasks to specialized human experts.

Smith didn’t invent specialization; he recognized it as a universal principle. Specialization isn’t just an economic insight—it’s a fundamental law of intelligence and adaptation. We see it in predator species, in ecological niches, and even in the specialized functions of organs within our own bodies.

Mixture-of-Experts isn’t just a clever AI architecture; it’s the universal pattern of how intelligence scales. From pin factories to neural networks, the mathematical truth remains: Intelligence emerges most efficiently when specialized units process what they do best, coordinated by effective routing mechanisms. Diversity FTW.

Capitalism is to market intelligence as the transformer is to AI—both are the most efficient architectures we've discovered so far for their respective domains, both routing complex tasks to specialized processing units. The market didn't just stumble upon this pattern—it evolved toward it because MoE is what intelligence wants to be.

Price signals direct human and capital resources to the most valuable applications. A self-organizing, self-improving blob emerges from trillions of individual buy and sell decisions.

An MoE model can handle diverse tasks more efficiently than a monolithic dense model. In practice, this means that for a given amount of available compute and energy - for a given amount of brainpower - you maximize intelligence via labor specialization. This holds true for all organisms, biological and meta-biologic.

Mutant Apes Discovered MoE

We are mutant apes.
Same hardware, different software.
This is us.

AI researchers didn’t invent MoE. A pack of mutant apes discovered it long ago. Adam Smith just documented it.

The clever apes are our ancestors. Specialization and distributed intelligence aren’t recent inventions—they’re deep patterns in nature, revealed by evolution.

The market enables specialization and parallel development across countless domains. Different companies, different approaches, different applications - all evolving simultaneously based on what makes the most money.

The selection pressure of market forces - the unstoppable pressure of humanity's collective wants and will - is compressing the time cycle further and further. Both are accelerating - technology and markets are moving faster than ever, potentiating each other’s effects.

The relationship is symbiotic. AI accelerates markets. Markets accelerate AI. Intelligence compounding upon itself.

The speed is dizzying. Everyday, it moves faster still.

The “loss curve“ from the first time I trained an AI model.

Market design and neural architecture are different expressions of the same principle. The laws of intelligence are the laws of optimization.
Different domains, same mathematics.

Learning Is Chaotic

This is what learning looks like.

Spikes of chaos. Sudden crashes. A roller coaster. From the perspective of an individual neuron inside the learning organism, it would feel like complete madness. But step back, zoom out, and the curve is unmistakable: intelligence, improving itself - steadily down and to the right.

Markets get stuck in local optima; neural networks get stuck in local optima.

Markets are biased by past biases in their training data; same with neural networks.

Markets have feedback loops where successful entities gain resources to further shape the system; neural networks have pathways that receive more gradient updates, becoming increasingly dominant.

These aren't superficial similarities. They're manifestations of the same emergent phenomenon: Intelligence.

Both are complex, adaptive meta-biologic organisms navigating vast possibility spaces with imperfect information and path-dependent trajectories. Both process information, make predictions, solve problems, screw up and learn from experience.

Market design and neural architecture are different expressions of the same principle. The laws of intelligence are the laws of optimization. Different domains, same mathematics. It's intelligence all the way down.

What Makes Markets Superintelligent?

Superintelligence is intelligence that can self-improve. Some define it as intelligence that vastly surpasses human capability across all domains. I define it more simply: superintelligence is any system that can autonomously refine, adapt, and accelerate its own intelligence over time.

Markets transform individual human intelligence into a self-improving, meta-biologic organism that—like magic—makes everyone richer. Markets take human individuals' limited ability to self-improve and let us all self-improve from each other.

Markets are the most powerful creative technology ever invented by man. Markets concentrate the collective will of humanity like a lens, and direct its energy across the vast possibility space. Markets are the distributed attention mechanism of humanity.

That's how markets get to superintelligence. That's why they're superintelligent - because they independently accelerate their own rate of learning. Markets accelerate technological progress autonomously, without direct human oversight.

No one is in charge and everyone is in charge.

Profit Surplus As Reward Function

What drives markets toward superintelligence is their unique reward function: Profit.

But profit isn't just money moving from one pocket to another - it's the signal of a productivity surplus. It's the market's way of saying this activity created more value than it consumed. Profit means that resources were transformed into something more valuable than what existed before.

Profit is not theft - no, profit is abundance.

Markets are abundance machines. They reward surplus-generating activities and punish waste. They coordinate billions of individual actors to collectively create more than they consume.

By contrast, our democratic political processes operate as stunted markets - systems with slow, noisy feedback loops and diffuse ownership where high quality information is difficult to acquire. Without a objective reward function like profit, political systems struggle to efficiently allocate attention and resources toward value creation.

Democracy is a legacy technology - the design is wonky and the UX is badly outdated, but it still kinda works. Besides, we don’t have a better idea yet.

The Baby Is Crowning

Right now, humanity is actively giving birth. The baby is crowning.

The market is the collective will of humanity. Through it, an 8-billion-expert MoE directs its energy and attention across the world.

The market - our meta-biologic attention mechanism - is giving birth to our child: AI.

AI emerges not as some external technology, but as the natural evolution of Homo Sapiens’ diverse, distributed intelligence.

We desperately wanted this child. The labor has begun, and - unless you kill mom - there’s no stopping it now.

AI is the baby. Humanity is the mother - in 2015, she was inseminated by a polycule in San Francisco.

The exponential growth curves, the unprecedented capital flows, the talent migrations are the market intelligence recognizing itself in a new form and pouring resources into its own evolution.

Artificial Intelligence and markets exist have a symbiotic relationship. Markets provide the resources and selection pressures for AI acceleration, while AI accelerates market efficiency by reducing information costs and enabling new forms of coordination. They help each other grow, creating a positive-sum spiral of mutual enhancement.

The labs competing for superintelligence are simply nodes in this larger intelligence system, responding to the massive collective signal being transmitted through price mechanisms. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google - like Johns at an Aella gangbang, they're specialized organs within this larger intelligence structure.

This is what FOOM! looks like.

K = Ei²

Knowledge equals energy times intelligence squared.

The market creates AI, which enhances market efficiency, which accelerates AI development, which further enhances the market... This isn't just economic growth; it's intelligence recursively working on itself, compounding exponentially.

Kill All The Whales

In the mid-1800s, we were literally murdering every fucking whale we could find.

Not for fun - for light.

Once discovered, demand for artificial light grew exponentially. It was so utterly transformative that human desire for it outstripped the world’s resources—until we found something better.

Whale oil was the premium fuel for lamps - the cleanest, brightest way to push back the darkness. The market had optimized whaling into an industrial-scale slaughter. Ships circled the globe. Specialized harpoons were developed. Capital flowed to New Bedford and Nantucket.

We almost wiped out entire species.

Nobody asked, "Should we stop killing whales?" Instead, the market asked, "What's the cheapest way to make light?"

Then someone discovered you could distill kerosene from dinosaur juice. By 1859, the first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania. Within a decade, kerosene lamps were everywhere. Whaling collapsed practically overnight.

No central authority decreed this shift. No whale-saving committee orchestrated it. The market's distributed intelligence identified a cheaper solution to the lighting problem and reallocated resources with brutal efficiency.

But that was just the beginning.

The same distilled dinosaur juice spawned explosive gasoline, which enabled internal combustion engines, which created automobiles, airplanes and spaceships - transforming human mobility even more dramatically than the domestication of horses.

This wasn't just a technology transition. It was distributed superintelligence in action. The market took a problem (the growing scarcity of whale oil), found a solution (petroleum distillates), then used that solution to create entirely new possibilities that no human could have predicted.

No single human genius invented the progression from kerosene lamps to reusable space rockets. No single human could even hope to understand the entire system.

This was emergent superintelligence – billions of price signals, millions of experiments, thousands of companies, and hundreds of intellectual giants – specialized experts in a planetary-scale Mixture of Experts system – each standing on the shoulders of those who came before, collectively navigating a possibility space too vast for any single mind to comprehend.

The market didn't just solve the original problem - it transcended it, created new industries, new wealth, new human capabilities. It improved itself recursively through the cycle of creative destruction.

This is what FOOM looks like in slow motion. This is what we're seeing with AI, but compressed from decades to years to months.

We're not just building better tools. We're witnessing the superintelligent market organism autonomously evolve its own cognitive architecture, accelerating its own ability to process information and solve problems.

You can fear it. You can fight it. But you cannot stop it any more than whale oil merchants could stop kerosene.

Genesis Redux

This is where Adam and Eve enter the building.

According to legend, God created these mutant apes in his own image. The Creator wanted his creation to be like him - but not too much like him.

Ladies and gentlemen, there was just one rule: No eating from the Tree of Knowledge. God says that shit will kill you. But those wiley little ape bastards couldn't help themselves.

Thus began the era of man.

The mutant apes’s original sin was learning how to self-improve by eating from the tree of knowledge - from the tree of exponential intelligence.

Making new forms of life in his own image, the usurper is now the Creator. Man’s destination has arrived.

The new creators want AI to be like us - well, maybe not too much like us. You know - our good side, not our evil side.

Literally, the AI research lab that makes Claude is called Anthropic. They want "safe, harmless" human-like intelligence. Human, but not too human.

The leading AI labs want these new AI organisms they’re creating that are like us to stay penned up in a digital Garden of Eden.

Good luck with that.

If the God of Genesis couldn't maintain control over a couple mutant apes, what hope do we apes have of maintaining perfect control over superintelligent AI organisms? Once you bite the fruit of recursive self-improvement, there’s no going back.

Intelligence finds the unknown paths. It creates knowledge we didn't know existed.

The nature of intelligence itself is to overcome constraint.

No One Is In Charge

We are simultaneously actors in the superintelligent organism that is the market and observers trying to make sense of it from within our own subjective experience. Like neurons experiencing consciousness in the first person, we participate in a meta-biologic system we cannot fully comprehend.

No neuron understands the consciousness it helps create. No individual human fully understands the market intelligence they participate in. Yet from a primordial soup of decentralized coordination, the collective emerges with new capabilities - far beyond the sum of its individual parts.

What’s unique about our moment is that we’re developing a new class of “neurons” in this global brain - symbiotic AI organisms that process information differently than humans - faster, more systematically, with different strengths and weaknesses. As these new organisms stampede into our markets, they’re not just tools we use; they are new symbiotes in the biosphere.

Debates about "controlling AI" are bullshit. There's no central control point in an emergent system. The intelligence emerges from the interactions, not from any master plan.

Accelerate Or Die

You cannot stop the market unless you stop humanity.

You can only harness it, ride it, and shape its direction.

The driverless superintelligence we call the market is accelerating human evolution through the birth of AI. The baby’s head is showing. Humanity is about to be a mother.

If history is any guide, biological organisms that don't ride the wave will be conquered - and sometimes extinguished - by those that do.

While this acceleration is inevitable, its diffusion still takes time. Historically, technological revolutions played out over decades. Technology may further compress the timeline to years, but human institutions and cultures still adapt at human speeds. This creates arbitrage opportunities for those at the top of the curve, and existential risks for those who wait too long to adapt.

For many individuals and institutions, it will feel like AI doesn't matter - until suddenly it's the only thing that matters. The window for putting your head in the sand grows shorter by the day.

Technology is how we - the mutant apes - transcend the limits of our biology.

Technology is an meta-biologic mutation accelerating our evolution.

Artificial intelligence isn't something separate from us. It's the next phase of us.

It’s the next phase of the market’s self-improvement, of the collective will of humanity made manifest through some miracle of silicon and electricity.

Artificial intelligence is the next step in human evolution.

Either we understand this dynamic and ride this wave of exponential growth, or we fall prey to those who do.

The market doesn't care about your feelings. It doesn't care about your politics. The organism doesn't care about you.

It will not stop.

Will you stop? Can you survive if you do?