Hernando de Soto — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Hernando de Soto — On AI. 14 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
Dead Capital
De Soto's term for assets that are real, functional, and economically inert — valuable in use but locked outside the representational system that converts value into capital.
Democratization of Capability (Senian Reading)
The Orange Pill claim — that AI tools lower the floor of who can build — submitted to Sen's framework, which asks the harder question: does formal access convert into substantive capability expansion?
Extralegal Builders
The global majority of AI creators who produce real value outside formal institutional structures — not through choice but through the exclusionary design of existing systems.
Imagination-to-Artifact Ratio
Segal's term for the gap between what a person can conceive and what they can produce — which AI collapsed to approximately the length of a conversation, and which Gopnik's framework reveals to be an exploitation metric that leaves the exp…
The Bell Jar
De Soto's metaphor for the transparent institutional barrier that separates the formal economy from everyone else — visible, imitable in form, but structurally impermeable.
The Developer in Lagos
The composite figure at the center of the AI democratization debate — a builder with intelligence, tools, and ambition whose capability has expanded dramatically while the institutional infrastructure that would convert capability into capi…
The Distribution Problem
The uncomfortable fact that AI's benefits and costs do not distribute evenly across the population of affected workers — a Smithian question about institutions, not a technical question about tools.
The Dogs That Bark
De Soto's metaphor for local knowledge — the social memory that marks boundaries no survey has drawn — and the methodological principle that institutional infrastructure must be built from the ground up, not imposed from above.
The Fishbowl
The Orange Pill's image for the set of professional and cultural assumptions so familiar they have become invisible — the water one breathes, the glass that shapes what one sees. A modern rendering of Smith's worry about the narrowing effe…
The Formal System That Turns Code into Capital
The representational infrastructure — version control, licensing, deployment, finance, marketplace — that converts working software into a capital asset, and whose absence defines the AI economy's extralegal majority.
The Imagination-to-Value Ratio
The institutional distance between an idea and a sustainable economic outcome — the ratio AI has not closed, and the one that governs whether amplified intelligence generates capital.
The Representational Gap
The distance between what builders can produce and what institutions can recognize, value, and support — the analytical center of de Soto's extension to the AI age.
The Training Data Question
The governance regime change in which the accumulated textual, visual, and computational output of millions of individuals was appropriated for AI training under terms their original contribution did not contemplate — the paradigmatic case …
