What Happens When Intelligence Becomes Abundant?

Imagine the price of a competent answer to almost any question falling by a thousandfold in a decade. Not a perfect answer — a competent one, the kind a diligent junior professional might produce after a morning's work. Now imagine that price falling by another thousandfold.

This is not a thought experiment. It is a rough description of what has already happened to a large class of cognitive work, and the trend shows no sign of reversing. Whatever else artificial intelligence turns out to be, it is a machine for making thinking cheap.

We do not have good intuitions about what cheap thinking does to a society, because we have never had any. Every institution we have inherited — the professions, the universities, the credentialing bodies, the pricing of advice — was built in a world where expertise was scarce, slow to acquire, and locked inside individual heads. The scarcity was not incidental. It was the foundation.

What scarcity built

Consider how a profession works. A body of knowledge is gathered, formalised, and taught. Entry is gated by examination. Practitioners are licensed, and the licence is worth something because it is hard to get. Fees reflect the years required to earn it. Institutions form to protect the standard, and, not coincidentally, the scarcity.

None of this is cynical. Gating expertise protects the public from incompetence. But it also means that the value of a professional has been tightly coupled to the difficulty of replicating what they know. When that difficulty collapses, the coupling breaks, and it is not obvious what remains.

What abundance reveals

Here is a first attempt at an answer: what remains is judgment, and judgment was always the point.