Baumol's Cost Disease Hits AI: Human Attention Is the New Bottleneck
curious_vii · x · 2026-10-01
The author argues AI's "Baumol's Cost Disease" cuts both ways:
- Bad: a growing share of the workday goes to human glue work — approving small purchases, MFA flows, cd'ing into the right project folder.
- Good: output per prompt rises sharply, so people invest more time upfront in understanding context, the problem's nature, and success criteria before spinning up agent threads.
The former will likely be fixed by better UX and technical primitives from the labs; the latter demands unprecedented prioritization and focus. The takeaway: human attention is the scarce resource of the AI era, shifting work from execution to problem definition.
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