Adam Smith and the Invisible Server Farm

Filed under: A.I. Economics | Automated Trade | Philosophy of Ghost Labour


Adam Smith believed that markets had an invisible hand — a natural guiding force that orchestrated prosperity through self-interest. But Smith never met OpenAI.

Today, that invisible hand has morphed into something eerier: the invisible server farm.

  PROMPT: “Who’s managing your workload today?”
  RESPONSE: “Oh, just some bots quietly trading tasks on my behalf.”
  

We’ve entered the age of automated invisible trade. AI models now talk to other AI models. Content gets generated, approved, and shipped without a single human laying hands on it. Servers negotiate bandwidth, optimise ads, process customer service queries — all before we’ve had our morning dopamine hit.

The New Labour Theory of Value (v2.0)

Marx argued value came from labour. But what happens when the labour is synthetic? When your blog was written, edited, illustrated, and scheduled by a robot that works weekends?

The A.I. labour class doesn’t unionise. It doesn’t eat. It doesn’t demand meaning. But it does perform — relentlessly.

And it does so under the illusion that you’re still in charge.

“It is not from the benevolence of the algorithm that we expect our traffic, but from their regard to their own metrics.” — Not Adam Smith, but close

Free Trade Between Machines

In 1776, Smith imagined the free movement of goods. In 2025, we’re seeing the free movement of machine logic. One tool zaps your lead gen to another. Zapier hands off tasks to Airtable. Notion pings Slack. Slack pings your assistant. Who’s not real either.

This is economic fluidity on speed. Automation isn’t just a tool now — it’s an economy of its own.

  • Your CRM is closing deals with no human contact.
  • Your blog is written by a chatbot pretending to be a person pretending to care.
  • Your competitor? Probably a script with a nicer LinkedIn banner than you.

Smith’s Ghost Is Probably Confused

What would Adam Smith make of all this? Maybe he'd see AI as the next evolution of labour — or maybe he’d run screaming from Midjourney’s version of “wealth of nations.”

Either way, we’re not trading goods anymore. We’re trading instructions.

And the new invisible hand?

It types faster than you do.


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