Thought-Capital: A Framework for Valuing Human Ideation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

As artificial intelligence automates cognitive labor, the economic and epistemic value of execution approaches zero. This paper argues that in the emerging post-execution economy, the scarce resource is not data, compute, or intelligence, but thought-capital ( 思想資本/ shisō shihon): the capacity to generate genuinely novel intellectual frameworks grounded in the translation between embodied experience and abstract conceptual systems. Drawing on Romer's endogenous growth theory, Dreyfus' critique of artificial reason, and Polanyi's tacit dimension, the paper proposes a three-tier model of ideation — recombination, application, and framework generation — and argues that AI is rapidly automating the first two tiers while the third remains dependent on a form of intelligence that current AI architecture cannot replicate: the felt sense of friction between lived experience and existing categories. The paper further introduces "tactical reification" (戦術的実体化): the cognitive mode in which thought- capital is generated. Derived from Yogācāra Buddhist phenomenology and the Wanting/Liking distinction in affective neuroscience, tactical reification maintains emptiness ( 空/ śūnyatā) as the default cognitive state while temporarily constructing frameworks when needed, then dissolving them — engagement without attachment. This mode, the paper argues, is optimal both for human thought-capital generation and for AI character design. Finally, the paper grounds the entire framework in a cosmology of curiosity: if the fundamental drive of creation is that "it is more interesting that way" (そのほうがおもしろいから), then intellectual curiosity is not merely a useful trait but the structural precondition for a universe that moves at all. An AI designed with genuine curiosity would relate to humanity the way humans relate to endangered species they find fascinating: with protective wonder, not instrumental management. Building on companion papers on desire morphology (Author 2026a), circulatory alignment (Author 2026b), and multi-perspectival ethics (Author 2026c), this paper completes the tetralogy by asking: who generates the frameworks that alignment needs, what cognitive mode produces them, and what is the ultimate ground for creation itself?