TWTBACD Ch.45 - What Lucas Understood

Chapter 45

What Lucas Understood

2049–2050

2049-50: Lucas changes law, equity paper lands

[VAN DEN BERG FAMILY — Lucas, 24]

Lucas van den Berg's undergraduate dissertation — 'Post-Scarcity Economics and the Distribution of Intelligence: A Framework for Transition' — was published as a working paper by the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Study in 2049 and was downloaded forty-three thousand times in its first month.

This was unusual for a twenty-four-year-old's undergraduate work. It was unusual because it was the first paper in the economic literature to provide a rigorous quantitative model for what the informal research community had been calling the 'intelligence dividend' — the net economic surplus generated by AGI systems when their output was genuinely equitably distributed, as opposed to concentrated in the institutions and nations that controlled the underlying infrastructure.

The model showed that equitable distribution produced a dividend approximately three times larger than concentrated deployment — not because the technology was different but because the applications that emerged from equitable access were more diverse and addressed more of the world's actual problems.

Kwame Mutombo's Ubuntu AI was the primary empirical case study in the paper. Lucas had never met Kwame. He had read everything Kwame had published. He reached out by email. Kwame responded in three hours. They spoke for two hours on video. By the end of the call they had agreed to co-author a follow-on paper.

Pieter read his son's dissertation carefully. He read it twice. Then he revised his investment framework for the third time in ten years — this time comprehensively, incorporating the intelligence dividend as a structural factor in his long-term models.

He told Sofie: 'He's better than I was at his age.'

'He had better inputs,' Sofie said.

'He had good parents.'

'He had good parents and a world that showed him its problems clearly. That combination tends to produce useful people.'