Death of the Public Intellectual: What happens when intelligence becomes a commodity available on demand?
“I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities, especially in the southern colonies, could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre-capital—”
Michael Ashley – Remember this film?
In the famous scene, Will Hunting (Matt Damon) destroys his intellectual rival with this takedown: “Of course that’s your contention. You’re a first-year grad student. You just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably. You’re gonna be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon. Then you’re gonna be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That’s gonna last until next year. You’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.”
The face-off ends with Will getting the phone number of the woman they were both trying to impress. He then slaps those digits on the window as he’s leaving with this classic line: “You like apples? How you like ‘em apples?”
Good Will Hunting came out in 1997.
Back then, we were a different country with a different culture. Intellectuals were celebrated. Novelists like Norman Mailer and Toni Morrison were treated like celebrities. It was cool to name drop nonfiction essayists like David Foster Wallace or scientific luminaries like Stephen Hawking into conversations.
Likewise, being able to debate Ayn Rand’s objectivism versus Karl Marx’s collectivism signaled you were well-read. It was the height of sophistication to be able to rattle off the tenets of artistic movements from Cubism to Impressionism.
Now that AI is here, that version of intellectualism may be dying.
Reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking showed this to me. The book references venerable poets such as W.H. Auden, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot across its pages. Published in 2005, two years before the iPhone, it explores the grief that Didion endured upon the loss of her famous literary husband John Gregory Dunne.
It might as well have been written 200 years ago; the world has changed so much since then. It’s not just that Google killed the fun of trivia nights and that we now have chatbots to explain Relativity like we were six years old.
Information on demand diminished the mystique of the public intellectual. Abundance is the culprit. 1997 was nearly three decades ago.
Back when Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were first becoming household names it was tough to access information you didn’t know. Google.com was only registered this same year, indicating the nascent state of online search.
Back then if you needed to know something, you had to take a trip to the library. Or contact someone who knew the answer.
This reality prized smarts.
A public intellectual like Noam Chomsky could fill an auditorium with people eager to hear him discuss the intricacies of language and syntax. On campuses, students stayed up late discussing the merits of transcendentalism.
It wasn’t unusual to see Jack Keroauc’s prose from On the Road on dorm posters: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time…” or the final lines from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning—”
Take a look around in 2026. Information abundance has disrupted society. Before anyone could access knowledge, there was a cache on possessing it. Our culture revered professors, academics, historians, poets, scientists, and novelists much more than we do today because developing a life of the mind is hard.
Those who engaged with ideas performed feats not so different from professional athletes who excel physically.
Now that anyone can sound intelligent by consulting ChatGPT, perception has shifted. It doesn’t seem so impressive to know things others do not because anyone can track down the info they need.
This reality has produced real economic impacts on knowledge workers. Lawyer friends have told me they are inundated with clients sending them AI-generated contracts they want them to double-check. This is just one example of how intelligence, once possessed by the few, is now available to the masses as a commodity.
To understand what happens to a society in which intelligence is democratized, consider this fact.
My father began practicing law in the 1980s. Back then, he had to physically go to a law library to research precedent for a case. It could take him sometimes up to eight hours or more to pore over physical books to get the answer he needed.
Now?
You can type a query into LexisNexis and get the info you need in nanoseconds. Such ease undermines the value of the public intellectual in much the same way music is now treated as a disposable commodity.
Before streaming placed nearly every song ever recorded at our fingertips, access to great music was comparatively scarce. You couldn’t just hit a button and listen to Beethoven’s Ninth. You had to attend a live performance, something rare and therefore, valuable.
Now that AI is here, we don’t even have to depend on others to make music to listen to. Anyone with very little skill can turn out musical compositions using apps like SunoAI. It may not (yet) be Beethoven level quality, but the difference is becoming increasingly negligible as AI improves.
Of course, time does not stand still.
Every age has its advancements. What was the norm yesterday is bound to differ tomorrow. Still, as culture undergoes one of the most profound shifts in human history, we would be wise to ask not merely what technology can do, but what it is doing to us
SF Source The AI Philosopher Jun 2026