In the past, the limiting factor was labor (people's time). You had to trade your time for money because making things was hard. We had a scarcity of creation.
AI flips the script completely. Now, creation becomes super abundant because AI can make infinite content, code, and solutions almost instantly.
Now the thing that becomes scarce is human attention and judgment.
If AI can generate infinite content, infinite code, infinite solutions, the constraint shifts to attention and judgment. The scarce resource becomes the ability to distinguish signal from noise, quality from quantity, meaningful from meaningless.
As AI gets better at creating, humans become more valuable at choosing. The flood of AI-generated content doesn't replace human creators, it makes human curation (select, refine, and apply judgment) exponentially more valuable.
This creates a new economic hierarchy:
- AI generates raw output
- Humans curate and refine
- Humans create frameworks for curation
- Humans design the systems that design the frameworks
The people panicking about AI taking their jobs are thinking linearly. They see AI as a replacement rather than a multiplier. But multiplication, not substitution, drives exponential value creation.
When the amount of AI output grows exponentially, the value of human curation grows exponentially right along with it.
The smartest move is not to try to compete with AI at doing simple, repetitive tasks.
The smart move is to position yourself as the person who guides, manages, and designs the systems that use the AI.
Top comments (0)