CONCEPT
External Goods
Goods contingently attached to a practice but not constitutive of it — money, prestige, power, status — the goods that markets can measure and that AI systems can amplify.
External goods are the goods that practices can produce but that are not unique to them — money earned through chess could equally have been earned through poker; prestige achieved through medicine could equally have been achieved through politics. MacIntyre's distinction matters because external goods are the only goods that institutions and markets can reliably recognize, and because AI has a particular efficiency at producing them. When a technology amplifies external goods without amplifying internal goods, the ratio between the two shifts, and the incentive structure that sustains practices is progressively eroded. The accumulation of external goods without internal goods is the structural signature of the pathology MacIntyre calls institutional corruption.
In The You On AI Field Guide
External goods have three features that distinguish them from internal goods. First, they are objects of competition — the more one person has, the less there is for others. Second, they can be obtained through any number of activities, not only through the practice that