AI could make scarcity disappear by slashing costs between raw resource and product
r0ck3t23 · x · 2026-09-29
The author argues AI's biggest impact may be less about replacing jobs and more about making scarcity stop feeling scarce.
- Metal still must be mined, food grown, energy produced—the physical constraints remain.
- But much of what things cost today is all the work between raw resource and final product: mining, moving, building, operating.
- AI can compress those intermediate steps dramatically, and that shift could matter even more than the jobs it replaces.
More from AGI Musings
- Most ordinary people use no AI tools at all and don't know what an agent is — RachelVT42 · 2026-09-29
- davidad: Opus 3 training resembled optimal transport, modern midtraining more like KL divergence — davidad · 2026-09-29
- AI-native law firms recruit 11-year veteran lawyers as clients follow people, not firms — jkubicki · 2026-09-29
- DeepMind's Pushmeet unveils DOE Genesis Mission report on AI-accelerated science — pushmeet · 2026-09-29
- Stratechery: Meta going for enterprise agents is a big mistake — Stratechery · 2026-09-29
- Paper Puts a Number on AI-Human Attention Gap: Context Windows Up 3,906x, Focus Down — alex_verem · 2026-09-29