When intelligence gets cheap, value migrates to land, time, attention, trust, and care.
On work, vocation, and what an economy is for when goods get cheap
Economics calls itself the science of scarcity. It is a fair description and, if the machines keep their promises, a temporary one.
The claim beneath the current moment is not really about artificial intelligence. It is about cost curves. Intelligence, the expensive ingredient in nearly every good and service, is getting cheaper at a rate with few precedents. Analysis gets cheaper, so law and medicine and research get cheaper. Coordination gets cheaper, so logistics and administration get cheaper. Generation gets cheaper, so media, design, and software get cheaper. Even the physical world is downstream of intelligence: the factory, the farm, and the delivery route are all, in large part, arrangements of decisions, and decisions are what is being discounted.
Follow the curve honestly and you arrive at a strange place: a world where the necessities and most of the comforts cost a small fraction of what they cost your grandparents, where the floor of material life is high and rising, and where the old sentence, I cannot afford it, slowly stops being the organizing fact of most lives.
We have a preview of this logic in the goods we already made abundant. Food in the developed world became so cheap that our diseases inverted: the poor no longer starve in the old way; they suffer from abundance's pathologies instead. Clothing became so cheap we throw it away. Computation became so cheap we waste it on nothing, constantly, and call the waste a feed. In each case the same thing happened: when a good becomes abundant, it stops conferring status, stops organizing effort, and stops being thought about at all, and value migrates, instantly and ruthlessly, to whatever is still scarce.
That migration is the real story of the coming economy, and it is not primarily a story about jobs.
What stays scarce when intelligence and goods are cheap? Land, in the places people actually want to live. Time, which no technology manufactures, only, perhaps, extends. Attention, already the most strip-mined resource in the world. Trust, which is built at human speed and cannot be synthesized in bulk. Presence: the actual company of actual people. Care, given by someone who knows your name. And standing, the judgment of your neighbors about what you are.
Notice what kind of list that is. The scarce goods of the abundant age are the goods that were never really commodities. They are the goods of a village.
Which brings us to work, because the fear that fills the commentary, what will people do?, smuggles in an assumption worth examining: that work is what people endure to obtain goods, so if goods arrive without endurance, people will have nothing. Anyone who has actually watched human beings knows this is half false. Work is also how a person answers the question of what he is for. It is structure against drift, proof against self-deception, and the ordinary theater in which character is either built or spent. The curse in Genesis is not labor itself, Adam is put in the garden to work it before the Fall. The curse is toil: work estranged from its fruit and its meaning. An economy that reduces toil is not stealing man's purpose. Done right, it is returning his work to him as vocation, chosen, crafted, aimed at a neighbor's real good rather than at mere survival.
Done wrong, of course, it returns nothing. Abundance that arrives as a feed and a stipend, to a population with no formation and no demands made on it, does not produce a renaissance. It produces a very comfortable despair, the kind our cheap-food and cheap-clothing revolutions already preview in miniature. The goods are not the hard part of the future. They never were. The hard part is what a civilization does with people whose labor it no longer needs at subsistence prices, whether it treats them as souls with vocations or as mouths with metrics.
Policy will argue about the distribution of the goods, and that argument matters; a floor held by all is better than abundance hoarded by the few owners of the machines. But distribution is the easy argument, the one accountants can have. The harder one belongs to families, churches, and schools: if the economy no longer forces formation on people through necessity, formation must be chosen on purpose, or it will not happen at all. Necessity was always a crude teacher, but it was a reliable one, and we have not yet noticed how much of our moral infrastructure was secretly load-bearing on it.
I keep coming back to the garden. Work before the curse was not a punishment or a market. It was a calling inside a gift. If the machines are really about to lift some of the curse's weight, the sweat, the scarcity, the fear that has organized human life since we left, then the question of the age is not economic at all, and economists will be the last to see it.
The question is whether we remember what the work was for.