What becomes scarce when intelligence becomes cheap?
Every time something becomes abundant, the value moves next door. A search for the next door.
the bottleneck always moves next door
trying to answer →What becomes scarce when intelligence becomes cheap?Where does value move when intelligence becomes commoditized?
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judgement, sitting idlethe problem nobody solvedtime: still scarcea perfect tool, unusedEconomists have an old, unglamorous rule that explains more about technology than most futurism does. When something becomes abundant, its price falls toward the cost of making it, and the value moves to whatever is still scarce next to it. Printing made copies cheap and made authors and editors valuable. Search made facts cheap and made attention expensive. The interesting question about cheap intelligence is not what it replaces. It is what it sits next to.
The rule of the next door
If the marginal cost of a competent paragraph, a working function or a decent analysis goes to nearly zero, three things happen at once. Output explodes. The average quality of that output converges. And everything that can’t be generated, because it is physical, or accountable, or scarce by definition, gets relatively more valuable.Joel Spolsky’s version, from 2002, is the corporate strategy: commoditize your complements. Make the thing next to your product cheap and demand for your product goes up.
The trick is to be precise about which is which. “Human creativity” is not an answer; it is a mood. The useful exercise is to go down the list of things intelligence is currently bundled with and ask, one at a time, whether each one gets cheaper along with it.
A ledger of scarcities
| Becomes abundant | Becomes scarce | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | Good questions | A model answers what it’s asked. Choosing what to ask is still the bottleneck. |
| Drafts | Judgement | When drafts are free, the valuable act is choosing the right one, and saying no to the rest. |
| Content | Attention | The supply of words explodes. The hours in a reader’s day do not. |
| Average expertise | Taste | When everyone has the median expert, the edge is the non-median opinion. |
| Software | Distribution | Anyone can build it. Few can put it in front of people. |
| Claims | Provenance and trust | When anything can be generated, who stands behind a thing matters more. |
| Cognition | Atoms and energy | Intelligence runs on chips, power and physical access, which don’t get cheap at the same rate. |
The question is not which jobs disappear, but which bottlenecks appear.
Accountability is the quiet one
A model can draft a contract, a diagnosis or an audit. It can’t be sued, struck off or embarrassed. Much of what professionals are paid for isn’t the thinking itself but the willingness to put a name to it. I suspect accountability, meaning a person who signs, becomes one of the most durable scarcities. It is scarce by construction, because it only works if it’s attached to someone who can lose something.Baumol’s cost disease points the same way: where productivity can’t rise (a string quartet still needs four players), relative prices go up. Being present and answerable may be the new quartet.
Where I’m unsure
Taste is the answer everybody gives, which makes me suspicious of it. Taste is scarce today partly because making things is expensive, so you need taste to decide what deserves the effort. If making things is free, taste might matter more, as the only filter left. Or it might matter less, because you can generate a thousand variants and let the market choose.
My provisional bet is on the filter. But this is exactly the kind of claim this room exists to test, not to repeat.
Every abundance creates a bottleneck. Find the bottleneck and you have found where the value went.