The verification economy
When producing an answer stops being the hard part, checking one becomes the business.
the stamp outlived the smith
trying to answer →What becomes scarce when intelligence becomes cheap?Why might human-made things become more valuable?
England has required silver to be tested and stamped since 1300. The stamp was tiny and it did one job: it told a stranger the metal was what it claimed to be. Once there is enough cheap imitation around, that little mark is the difference between metal and money.“Hallmark” is literally the mark of Goldsmiths’ Hall. We still use the word for “proof this is the real thing”.
Generated output is heading the same way. An essay, a chart, a legal memo, a photo of an event: all of them are now cheap to produce and expensive to trust. So the value moves from the thing to the evidence around it. Where it came from, who checked it, what they checked it against, and whether they have been right before.
That last one is the interesting part. Provenance tells you where something came from. Reputation is a visible record of judgement over time, and it can’t be generated after the fact. It has to be accumulated in public, which is partly why this site shows its working.
Unfinished: I don’t yet know whether verification ends up as infrastructure (content credentials, signatures, audit trails) or stays a human trade (editors, auditors, people with a track record). Probably both, priced very differently.