Humans as 'luxury goods' in the age of AI

People say Jobs cannibalized the iPod to make the iPhone.

Again, true. But utterly useless.

If you just look at where Apple makes money, you’d look at the iPhone through the lens of cannibalization.

But if you understand Jobs’s ecosystem strategy, you will realize that this was not a case of cannibalization but a case of strategic commoditization.

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AI can give you ten plausible answers, the final step - which one feels right - still belongs to someone you trust. That trust doesn’t come from logic or even pattern recognition. It comes from accumulated long-form discernment, taste, and context.

A well-framed inquiry concentrates resources and points effort toward high-leverage targets. If you haven’t crafted the right path of inquiry, you could sit with an LLM and waste time and resources wandering through plausible answers without a clear destination.

Without the right path of inquiry, abundance flips from asset to liability. Cognitive b... See more

When knowledge becomes abundant, value migrates to the functions that exist upstream and downstream from it: framing the inquiry and acting on the output.

First, economic value requires scarcity of supply.

Air is vital to life. Its intrinsic value is infinite.

But because it’s abundant, it has no economic value in most cases.

Of course, if you’re going Scuba diving, it’s no longer abundant and now commands economic value as compressed air.

Second, economic value requires relevance to demand.

A soldie... See more

In a world where knowledge is cheap,

curiosity, curation, and judgment

- signalled well - becomes insanely valuable.