🔮 What would Adam Smith make of AI?

Adam Smith gets flattened a lot. People on the market-friendly right claim him as an ancestor and stop there, as if that were the whole man. But the article starts from the older, stranger Smith: the moral philosopher who wrote about sympathy, self-examination and the way people learn to judge themselves through other people’s eyes. That matters here, because AI is being framed not just as a tool, but as a force that pushes on human judgment itself.

The author, in Edinburgh, where Smith spent his final 12 years, says he asked a simple question after watching the latest AI chaos: how would Smith make sense of it? The answer he arrived at is tidy and very Smith-like. He would welcome AI as a productivity tool. He would be wary of firms cooperating too neatly on policy. And he would be uneasy about handing something like moral agency to machines.

Rather than leave that as a thought experiment, the piece turns it into one. The author configured “R Adam Smith,” an Astra-based persona loaded with Smith’s work and recent AI debates about risk and pacing. The resulting exchange is presented as a kind of digital simulacrum: not the real Smith, obviously, but a way to test how his ideas travel into an argument he never saw.

The strongest answer in the excerpt comes when the fake Smith is asked whether AI is the ultimate pin factory. He says it might be, but in a different way. Smith’s old pin factory made one worker more productive by narrowing the task. AI, he suggests, could make one person more productive by giving access to many specialties at once — design, accounts, correspondence, selling. That could let people attempt work they couldn’t otherwise afford to do, and not just enrich existing firms.

And he sets a very Smithian test: do ordinary households get cheaper useful things, do newcomers get access to trades, does a wage buy more than before? If the answer is yes, then the machine has done something worth cheering. The caution comes right after. When manufacturers, including Dario Amodei of Anthropic, ask government to help slow development, Smith’s reply is blunt enough: sincerity does not erase self-interest.