The Free Intelligence Era: What Breaks When Thinking Costs Nothing
This is a personal reflection, not a forecast dressed up as one. I am writing about a trend I think is real, but the second-order consequences are guesses, and I am sure some of them are wrong. The single most important economic fact about AI is not that the models are getting smarter. It is that intelligence is getting cheap. For all of human history, thinking has been expensive. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, researchers, designers, programmers, analysts - the entire knowledge economy was built on the premise that competent cognition is a scarce resource you have to pay for. Universities exist to credential it. Firms exist to ration it. Salaries exist to compensate it. Whole cities exist because the cognitive workers cluster in them. Strip away the abundance of competent thinking and the post-industrial world stops making sense. ...