“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”
Melvin Kranzberg
The dentist has her hands in my mouth and I’m working out which jobs survive this.
I have to be in the room for her to work. Software reads x-rays now. Drilling teeth still takes her hands.
I quit my job in 2017 on a few years of savings and a software skill. Nine years on, a person with no training can ask for software in plain English.
Intelligence is getting cheap.
Economists call a technology that shows up everywhere at once a general purpose technology.
By one count there have been about 24 of them in human history including:
- Domesticated plants
- Writing
- The printing press
- The steam engine
- Electricity
- The computer
AI sits on that list. We are living through its arrival.
Each of those 24 technologies made some things cheap. Each one made other things scarce.
Money flows to whoever controls scarce resources.
So what does cheap intelligence make scarce? Start 5,400 years earlier.
Writing made remembering cheap
Around 3,400 BC, scribes in Mesopotamia started pressing marks into wet clay to record who owed what.
Before that most debts existed only in someone’s memory. After it a debt sat on a clay tablet either party could go and check.
Plato hated it. In the Phaedrus he has an Egyptian king tell the god who invented writing that the gift will backfire:
“If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.”
Remembering got cheap. Reading got expensive, because those marks meant nothing to anyone who couldn’t decode them.
Power moved to the scribes who could read and to the states that kept the records.
If you’ve ever ended an argument about what you paid by pulling up the receipt, you’ve used what the scribes invented.
Writing made reading a skill worth having.
The printing press made copies cheap
A print shop in the 1450s could turn out more in a day than a scribe could in a year.
After 50 years of printing, more than 9,000,000 books existed in Europe.
Guild rules covered hand-copying and said nothing about a press. So the scribes had no legal way to stop a print shop opening down the street.
For a printed book, paper ran to about half the cost. A scribe bought one sheet at a time and sold what they finished.
A printer selling on the open market bought thousands of sheets up front and got paid only if the books sold.
The trade stopped running on labor and started running on money. It moved to whoever could front the capital and choose the right manuscript. A bad choice meant paying for pages no one wanted.
If you’ve ever paid up front for something that never sold, you’ve run the printer’s risk.
Choosing what to print got expensive.
Steam made labor cheap
Between 1780 and 1840, British output per worker rose 46%.
Real wages rose 12%.
Economic historian Robert Allen named that gap Engels’ Pause. For 60 years the machines produced more while the people running them saw very little of it.
The profit rate roughly doubled. Profit’s share of national income grew at the expense of labor and land.
From 1840 to 1900 output per worker rose 90% while real wages rose 123%, passing productivity for the first time.
Wages caught up a generation late. Anyone who was 30 when the machines came would have been 90 before the numbers turned.
If your output went up this year and your pay stayed flat, that’s Engels’ Pause running again.
When a machine does what hands did, the money goes to whoever owns the machine.
Electricity made power cheap
Electric power was available in the 1880s. Productivity didn’t move until the 1920s.
Factories bought motors and dropped them into buildings laid out for steam.
A steam factory ran off one central shaft. Belts came down from it to each machine, so machines had to sit close to the shaft whether or not that suited the work.
An electric motor on each machine cut the belts.
Now the floor could be arranged in the order the work actually happened. Wide, single storey, lit from above, built around the product instead of around the power.
The factories that got the gains tore out the shaft and redrew the floor. The ones that bolted a motor onto the old layout got almost nothing.
If you put a chatbot into your workflow this year and nothing much changed, you added the motor and left the workflow exactly as it was.
Power got cheap and the money went to whoever knew what to rebuild around it.
Haber-Bosch made nitrogen cheap
Plants run out of nitrogen first.
Until 1909 the supply came from three places.
Lightning and rain delivered some. Root bacteria on peas and beans pulled more from the atmosphere. The rest came from bird droppings and nitrate beds in Chile.
You could not manufacture nitrogen.
You dug it up or you waited for weather.
The supply capped how many people the land could feed.
Fritz Haber pulled nitrogen out of the air in 1909. Carl Bosch made it industrial and the first ammonia plant ran at Oppau in 1913.
Synthetic fertilizer now supports roughly half the people alive.
Odds are that includes you.
The reaction takes enormous heat and pressure. It burns something like 1% to 2% of the world’s energy supply.
The ceiling on food stopped being land. It became energy.
Break a hard limit and whatever powered the breaking becomes the new limit.
Oil made moving cheap
Karl Benz patented a gasoline automobile in 1886. Ford’s assembly line turned the car into a middle-class purchase.
Between 1950 and 2000 the share of Americans living in suburbs climbed from 23% to 50%.
An engine changed where a person could afford to live.
If you drive to work, you can live further from your job than anyone could have in 1900.
In 1960 the countries sitting on the oil formed OPEC. By 1973 they could swing the price of almost anything that moved on oil.
Getting places got cheap and oil got expensive.
When moving gets cheap, the money goes to whoever owns the fuel the moving runs on.
The computer made calculation cheap
In 1987 the economist Robert Solow wrote that we see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics.
He meant it literally. Firms bought the machines and the output numbers sat flat.
The paradox held for years and economists argued about it the whole time.
What broke it was the work around the machine:
- The software
- The retraining
- The redrawn processes
- The people who could tell which tasks were worth automating
By then the computer was a commodity. Two rival firms could buy identical hardware off the shelf. One would pull ahead anyway. Hardware explained none of the gap.
IBM built the PC and set the standard. Microsoft sold the operating system that ran on it and Intel sold the chip inside it.
IBM captured the least of the three.
When the machine gets cheap, the money moves to whatever makes it useful.
The internet made publishing cheap
With the internet, you can publish as much as you like this afternoon for nothing.
Attention is as scarce as it always was, because a day still holds 24 hours.
So the value moved to whoever sits between the infinite supply and the fixed demand.
- The feed
- The ranking
- The recommendation
Setting the order became its own industry. It decides which of the infinite things a person ever sees.
When making it costs nothing, the money moves to whoever decides what gets seen.
What’s getting scarce now that intelligence is cheap?
Copies got cheap and picking got expensive. Making things got cheap and capital got expensive. Nitrogen got cheap and energy got expensive. Publishing got cheap and attention got expensive.
Intelligence got cheap.
What’s getting expensive?
1) Picking the right answer.
AI generates infinite plausible answers for free. Producing gets cheap. Picking gets expensive.
At Trends.vc, we sell judgment on which ideas are worth chasing.
2) Signing your name to the answer.
AI produces the answer and carries none of the loss when it’s wrong.
The auditor who signs the books, the engineer who stamps a drawing, the surgeon in the operating room. Each sells the same thing: a person who eats the consequence.
3) Getting anyone to look.
Cheap intelligence pours infinite supply into a day that still holds 24 hours. Curation and distribution capture the margin.
4) Being in the room.
If your work requires hands in a room, you have more runway than headlines suggest.
⁂
Progress relocates scarcity. Wealth belongs to whoever stands where it lands.
🏺
What could you create that gets more valuable as the cost of intelligence drops?
