capAItalism: a research program for re-deriving the forces and factors of capitalism under artificial intelligence
Jovan David Rebolledo-Mendez · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
This concept note introduces and dates the term capAItalism — capitalism with AI substituted at its core — and states the research program the term names: the primitives from which capitalist economies are derived (exchange, supply, demand; labour, resources, production, capital, money/value) must each be re-derived when the optimising agents inside the market are no longer exclusively human. It gives a working definition, decomposes it into eight primitives with the classical assumption each rests on, the way AI violates it and the observable that would show it, states two falsifiable propositions (fear-of-AI as displaced fear of accelerated capitalism; Hinton's maternal-instinct proposal read as a bidirectional control loop for allocation), and positions the term against 'AI capitalism', 'algorithmic capitalism', 'cognitive capitalism' and 「AI資本主義」. Deposited to fix the date of the coinage; later versions will supersede it.