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The Lens
There is a mirror-image to the aristocracy argument. What if AI does democratize intelligence? What if everyone, regardless of education or background, gains access to expert-level reasoning, writing, analysis, and creativity? This sounds utopian. But utopias have a way of generating their own pathologies.
Universal access to artificial intelligence may devalue the very human capabilities it augments. If everyone can produce expert-level analysis, then expert-level analysis becomes worthless. If everyone can write beautifully, then beautiful writing loses its signal value. The democratization of capability may trigger a collapse in the value of capability itself.
This essay examines the paradox of cognitive abundance: the possibility that giving everyone artificial intelligence makes no one more powerful, while simultaneously eroding the skills, institutions, and cultural forms that gave human intelligence its meaning.
The False Remedies
”People will find new ways to add value”
The optimistic response is that humans will move up the value chain, finding new forms of work and meaning that AI cannot replicate. This has been true in past technological transitions - but each transition has also left behind those who could not adapt. The question is whether this transition is different in kind, not just degree.
”Creativity is uniquely human”
The retreat to creativity as the last human redoubt assumes that creativity has inherent economic value independent of scarcity. But in a world flooded with AI-generated creative content, the scarcity premium that sustains creative professions evaporates. The question is not whether humans can be creative, but whether human creativity retains its cultural and economic value.
”Focus on what makes us human”
The appeal to ineffable human qualities - empathy, judgment, wisdom - assumes these qualities are legible and valued by markets and institutions. History suggests otherwise. The qualities we celebrate in philosophy are rarely the ones we reward in practice.
What We Actually Need
National
A fundamental rethinking of how societies value human contribution. This goes beyond labor policy to encompass education, culture, and the basic social contract. If human cognitive labor loses its market value, societies need new mechanisms to sustain human dignity, purpose, and livelihood.
Global
An international conversation about what it means to be human in an age of artificial intelligence - not as a philosophical abstraction, but as a practical policy question with implications for work, education, culture, and governance across every nation on earth.