At its most basic, an economy is just the exchange of goods and services.
In the early days of computing, machines were so massive they filled entire rooms. Only a handful of experts even knew how to operate them, and that scarcity made programmers extremely well-paid. But this pattern isn’t unique to computers. It’s something we’ve seen with almost every tool humans have built: calculators, stoves, cars, you name it.
Every new technology eventually democratizes itself.
A task that was once expensive, rare, and highly specialized becomes cheap, common, and easy. Calculators made math accessible. Stoves made cooking simple and safe. Cars, once luxury items, are now mass-produced and affordable. As the bar to using a tool falls, the number of ways we use it explodes.
And here’s the thing: democratization doesn’t kill markets, it shifts what matters.
Think about cars. At first they were prohibitively expensive. Once mass production kicked in, price dropped and demand soared. Now consumers care about everything besides simply getting from point A to B: performance, safety, comfort, status, recreation. The bar dropped, so value moved somewhere else.
Imagine if it went the other way, if driving required years of training and technical expertise. Cars would be expensive, rare, and a specialized class of drivers would be paid handsomely to operate them for us. That scarcity would create value.
The same thing is happening with knowledge right now.
For centuries we’ve had libraries and encyclopedias, anyone could learn anything if they had the time. Search engines made finding information instant. Now AI makes applying information instant. The bar keeps dropping.
You can already ask an AI, “What’s wrong with my car?” and get step-by-step instructions on how to fix it. The bottleneck isn’t the instructions anymore. It’s trust. It’s execution. It’s whether you even want to do it yourself.
When everyone can know something, knowing stops being the scarce resource.
Judgment becomes scarce. Context becomes scarce. Taste becomes scarce.
Skill was never the end goal, it was always the means to something deeper: making choices, solving problems, creating value. We just couldn’t separate the skill from the judgment before. AI is doing that separation for us.
And in a world where information is free, the rare thing is knowing what to do with it.