| I've been thinking about what happens to economic distribution when AI
collapses the cost of creation. A few observations that seem contradictory: *Creation is being democratized.* A solo developer with an AI assistant can
now ship in a weekend what used to take a team months. Writing, design, code,
music — the marginal cost of producing "good enough" output is approaching
zero across every creative domain. *But the means of creation are concentrating.* The models, the compute, the
training data — controlled by a handful of companies. We're all building on
rented land. The most democratizing technology in history has the most
centralized infrastructure. This creates a distribution question that doesn't fit old frameworks: 1. *If production cost → 0, what becomes scarce?* Classical economics says
value comes from scarcity. When anyone can build an app, write an article,
or compose a song, the scarce resource shifts. To what — taste? judgment?
distribution? trust? attention? 2. *The 1-person company at scale.* If one person + AI can do the work of
ten, do nine people lose their jobs, or do 10x more things get built?
History suggests new abundance creates new demand we can't predict. But
the transition speed is unprecedented. 3. *Who captures the surplus?* When AI cuts a $500K project to a $5K
weekend, where does the $495K go? To the creator (who keeps the savings)?
To the consumer (through lower prices)? To the AI provider (through
API fees)? To no one (it just evaporates as deflation)? 4. *The taste arbitrage.* If execution becomes commoditized, the remaining
edge is knowing what to build and for whom. This has always been true in
theory, but when execution cost was high, bad taste was protected by
barriers to entry. Now it isn't. I don't have a thesis. I'm genuinely uncertain whether AI leads to a more
equal distribution (everyone can create → broader participation in value
creation) or a more concentrated one (infrastructure monopoly → rent
extraction at the platform layer). What's your mental model for how this plays out? |
I just lol now, because those same people will be out of work with the AI I support.