🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the limitations of traditional capital theory in explaining value creation by artificial and natural intelligence in knowledge-driven economies. It introduces the concept of “knowledge-embodied capital,” reconceptualizing software, data, models, and organizational structures as accumulable, governable, and reconfigurable knowledge assets. The framework distinguishes five forms of knowledge: embodied, disembodied, institutionalized, commons-based, and public. Integrating political economy, institutional analysis, and information science, the work develops an original conditional theory of knowledge governance, featuring novel constructs such as initial transformation, cognitive enclosure, and feedback capture. The research demonstrates that the core of contemporary wealth lies not merely in capital accumulation but fundamentally in the governance of productive knowledge, thereby offering a new paradigm for evaluating the value generated by both artificial and natural intelligence.
📝 Abstract
This volume develops a knowledge theory of capital for economies in which productive capacity increasingly resides in software, data, models, routines, expertise, platforms, organizations, commons, and public epistemic infrastructure. Beginning from Adam Smith's theory of labour, stock, specialization, and market extent, it asks what changes when knowledge becomes stock-like, mobile across forms, scalable, governable, recombinable, and imperfectly visible in accounting. The book introduces knowledge-bearing stock as the central object and analyses how it is generated, converted into governable form, deployed, improved through feedback, enclosed or shared, measured, impaired, and used as input to future production. It distinguishes embodied, disembodied, institutionalized, commons, and public knowledge forms and develops concepts such as first conversion, cognitive enclosure, feedback capture, dark capital, and expected knowledge loss. The argument is conditional and testable: modern wealth depends not only on capital accumulation, but on how productive knowledge is governed.