Artificial Intelligence and the Nootransition: Between Digital Capital and Public Knowledge
Noonomy and Noosociety. Almanac of Scientific Works of the S.Y. Witte INID · Vol. 5, No. 2 · pp. 59-74
Abstract
The article examines the transformation of the role of artificial intelligence (AI) amid the systemic crisis of the neoliberal paradigm and the transition toward a qualitatively different model of civilizational development. AI is analyzed from a dual perspective: as an instrument for strengthening market domination, concentrating data, exercising algorithmic control over labor, and managing information flows; and as a potential infrastructure of public knowledge capable of supporting the movement toward a society organized around the priority of knowledge over capital, creative labor over alienated routine, and reasonable needs over consumer expansion. The study reveals the cyclical nature of technological enthusiasm by tracing historical continuity between the “railway mania” of Victorian Britain, the speculative dot-com boom at the turn of the millennium, and the current wave of investment euphoria in the AI segment. Each cycle demonstrates how the pursuit of super-profits stimulates technological breakthrough, while simultaneously generating financial bubbles, infrastructural disproportions, and a gap between expected capitalization and real productive effects. In many respects, it is precisely this “thirst” for super-profits that leads to systemic imbalances. The destructive effects of digital capitalism are subjected to critical analysis. The deprofessionalization of specialists, the erosion of labor subjectivity, and the transformation of personal data into a means of commercial and social control indicate the danger of substituting genuine innovation with an imitation of efficiency, accompanied by the actual degradation of the creative meanings of human activity. Narrative modeling, behavioral analytics, and the quantification of information capital reveal the methods through which public opinion can be purposefully shaped: data become a form of power, while information flows become an instrument of influence. Overcoming the destructive orientation of digital capitalism requires a revision of the target priorities of development. As an alternative, the article substantiates the concept of an intelligence-oriented economy as a transitional state on the trajectory toward noonomy. It argues for the need to shift economic relations away from capital accumulation and profit maximization toward the reproduction of public knowledge, the expansion of intellectual potential, and the liberation of the creative capacities of the individual. In this context, knowledge acts as a jointly used resource of social progress, while its private appropriation is interpreted as a constraint on creative and productive returns. The realization of this orientation and the nootransition itself are revealed through the strengthening of national scientific and engineering schools, the increase in the knowledge intensity of production, the formation of socially significant computing infrastructure, and the creation of distributed environments for collective cognition. Movement along this path is impossible without ethical norms for working with data and stable barriers against the manipulative use of intelligent technologies - barriers that ensure the autonomy of thinking, the intellectual security of society, and the preservation of the human being as a subject of goal-setting.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, nootransition, noonomy, intelligence-oriented economy, digital capital, social progress, public knowledge, knowledge intensity, information flows, scientific and engineering schools, algorithmic control, intellectual potential
For citation
Dmitriev N. D. (2026). Artificial Intelligence and the Nootransition: Between Digital Capital and Public Knowledge. Noonomy and Noosociety. Almanac of Scientific Works of the S. Y. Witte INID, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 59-74. DOI: 10.37930/2782-6465-2026-5-2-59-74