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“If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.”
Naval Ravikant
Last week I took a 2-hour walk and kept asking myself one question.
What becomes valuable as AI does more of our work?
In February 1968 New York’s sanitation workers wanted a raise of a few hundred dollars a year, so they walked off the job.
The year before, the state passed a law that banned public workers from striking. Their union leader John DeLury led the strike anyway.
About 100,000 tons of garbage piled up on the city’s streets.
A judge sent DeLury to jail. Vincent J. Cannato tells the story in his book The Ungovernable City.
Plenty of other people could learn to drive a garbage truck. But with all the drivers out at once, the city had no one to replace them.
The workers got their raise.
Dockworkers on the East and Gulf Coasts did the same in 2024. They shut the ports for a few days and won a 62% raise over six years.
Holding out together made common work scarce.
A typical nursing assistant in the US earns about $42,000 a year.
An anesthesiologist earns more than $350,000.
Both keep patients alive. Many people can learn to help a patient wash and eat. Few can be trusted to keep a patient unconscious through surgery and wake them up safely afterwards, so hospitals compete to hire anesthesiologists.
You could work harder than anyone on the ward as a nursing assistant and still earn a fraction of an anesthesiologist’s pay.
Companies get paid the same way. Only one company makes the most advanced chip-printing machines: ASML.
In 2025, it kept about 29 cents of profit from each dollar of sales.
Kroger shoppers can buy the same groceries at other stores across the street. The grocery chain keeps less than 2 cents of each dollar.
People and companies earn the most for work many people want done and few can do.
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What could you offer that isn’t available anywhere else?
