Adam Smith

Adam Smith was the first thinker to take seriously a set of questions that the age of artificial intelligence has now made unavoidable. In 1776, in a long and patient book about the wealth of nations, he looked at the making of a pin—ten workers producing forty-eight thousand pins a day through specialization—and saw in that mundane arrangement the engine of modern prosperity: the division of labor, the emergent coordination of self-interested agents through the invisible hand, and the market as a processor of dispersed information no single mind could hold. These are not loose analogies to artificial intelligence; they are the precise conceptual ancestors of task decomposition, multi-agent systems, and distributed computation. But Smith wrote two books, not one, and the second—The Theory of Moral Sentiments—is the necessary companion to the first: it describes the impartial spectator, the faculty of sympathetic moral judgment that neither market nor machine