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Superintelligence Isn't Enough
Fukuyama's October 2025 Persuasion essay — the most concise statement of his argument that the binding constraint on economic and political outcomes is not intelligence but implementation capacity.
Published in Persuasion in October 2025, "Superintelligence Isn't Enough" is Fukuyama's direct challenge to Silicon Valley's growth projections. The argument is compressed: "The binding constraint on economic growth today is simply not insufficient intelligence or cognitive ability." Economic growth depends on the ability to build real objects in the real world, navigate institutional complexity, and engage in the iterative back-and-forth between policymakers and citizens that implementation requires. Intelligence scales easily in software. It does not scale easily in the material and social world where the constraints are not cognitive but relational. The essay introduced the three circles of policy framework that Fukuyama developed more fully in his March 2026 follow-up "What AI Hypists Miss."
In The You On AI Field Guide
The essay's target was a specific claim that had become commonplace in AI-industry discourse: that sufficiently capable AI would produce extraordinary economic growth by automating cognitive work that had previously required human intelligence. Fukuyama challenged the claim on its own terms.