The Prosperous Society

The Prosperous Society is a three-hour, four-part series by Eric Seufert of Mobile Dev Memo that explores the political economy of artificial intelligence, grounded in the liberal tradition of the Western canon.Framed as an extended response to John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society, which serves as the intellectual foil for the series, The Prosperous Society makes the case that AI is not principally a story about intelligence, but about economics: it represents a progressive technological revolution that shifts the binding constraint on economic growth from production to distribution. In doing so, it redefines the role of digital advertising as the coordination infrastructure of an increasingly personalized economy.Last summer, when I began outlining The Prosperous Society, I set out to write an economic defense of artificial intelligence to serve as ballast for more pessimistic narratives. It was originally intended to be a short book. I pivoted to the podcast format when those narratives reached fever pitch earlier this year because I wanted to respond quickly and release new episodes on a regular cadence. But The Prosperous Society evolved into something broader: a defense of liberal political economy in the age of artificial intelligence.Over the course of three hours, I develop that thesis through four linked but distinct arguments:Part 1: Why AI makes distribution more important than production.Part 2: Why autonomous commerce is a false ideal.Part 3: Why personalization changes the economics of the long tail—and of identity itself.Part 4: Where the moral boundary lies between AI that expands freedom and AI that robs us of it.If the series succeeds, I hope it provides a rigorous intellectual case for why AI, if properly constrained and thoughtfully applied, can reaffirm the liberal tradition of Western political economy while helping to usher in one of the great periods of economic expansion in human history.