From human capital to asset ownership: AI as rentier asset

Scholars remain divided on AI’s implications for the future of work, with debate centred on what AI can do to jobs rather than on the economic regime shaping how it is deployed and who appropriates its returns. This article argues that AI’s impact on university-educated labour cannot be understood through technological capability alone, but requires analysing the rentier dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Drawing on political economy and sociology, it develops a framework for understanding AI as a productive rentier asset, one whose returns derive from constructed scarcity and access control rather than commodity exchange. Labour markets for university-educated workers are where the explanatory limits of human capital theory are most consequentially exposed. Credential devaluation, declining returns to educational investment, and oligopolistic capture of productivity gains are intelligible as outcomes of AI-driven assetisation. Addressing AI’s labour market effects requires engaging with mechanisms of ownership and access control, not technological capability alone.