Selection is the new bottleneck
A model will give you a hundred options in a minute. Knowing which one is good was always the job; now it is the whole job.
36 frames, one circle
trying to answer →What becomes scarce when intelligence becomes cheap?What happens to expertise when everyone has the same models?
Photographers used to shoot a roll of 36 frames, print them all on one contact sheet, and circle a single one in grease pencil. The shooting was hard, but the circle was the craft. Plenty of famous photographs were chosen from a sheet of near misses.The archive on this site is laid out as a contact sheet for exactly this reason.
AI turns everything into a contact sheet. Ten drafts of the email, forty logo directions, six architectures for the same service. Generation stops being the scarce step, and selection takes its place: which idea is worth pursuing, which answer is trustworthy, which output is actually good rather than merely fluent.
The catch is that selection is learned by generating. You learn to spot a good paragraph by writing a few hundred bad ones. If the model does the generating, where does the eye come from? That is the same apprenticeship worry as in Six shocks to expertise, one row down.
This is one row of the ledger in What becomes scarce, pulled out to look at on its own. Still collecting cases where the chooser, not the maker, captured the value.