Knowledge-Capital Expansion in Modernity: Public Knowledge and Epistemic Capitalization in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

This paper examines knowledge-capital expansion under modern conditions, with particular attention to the transformation of public knowledge into recursively expanding epistemic capacity. Building on the concepts of knowledge capital and epistemic capitalization, the inquiry situates contemporary artificial intelligence within a longer historical development of writing, archives, universities, scientific publication, digital databases, computational infrastructure, and increasingly automated knowledge production. Artificial intelligence intensifies this trajectory by expanding epistemic absorption, accelerating recombination and inquiry, enabling machine-scaled empirical investigation, and increasing the extent to which knowledge-generating processes can be organized through models, agents, compute, data, robotic systems, and other infrastructures. The paper develops the political economy of this transformation through Marxian concepts of accumulation, means of production, relations of production, automation, and alienation. Particular attention is given to the emerging position of the epistemic proletariat, whose generative capacity may increase while dependence upon externally controlled epistemic infrastructure simultaneously deepens. The analysis further examines the growing separation among epistemic production, epistemic encounter, human knowing, and subject formation. Traditional models of inquiry, learning, experience, judgment, curiosity, and self-cultivation are considered alongside philosophical accounts of the value of knowing, including instrumental, autonomous, generative, formative, and existential dimensions. The paper also identifies justice problems arising from machine-scaled capitalization of public knowledge. These include unequal capitalization capacity, concentration of generative infrastructure, generative extraction, attention scarcity, epistemic crowding, recursive visibility advantage, and the emergence of framing and definitional power. A Generative Relational perspective is introduced to analyze the delegation of knowledge-generating relations and the possible redistribution of subject formation across epistemic and non-epistemic domains. The inquiry advances neither technological optimism nor technological pessimism. It treats AI-mediated epistemic capitalization as an historically unfolding transformation whose consequences remain contingent upon changing relations of access, control, attention, experience, circulation, and generativity.