- Home>
- Uncategorized>
- The future of value [IN PROGRESS]
Note: This post is still in progress, but I want to update it in real-time here and post it while I’m working on it.
Last edit: 2025-12-26
Phase 1: Humans decide the direction; AI executes everything digital better than humans.
Phase 2: AI executes everything physical better than humans.
Phase 3: AI independently decides direction and goals without humans.
After that, there are several possible outcomes.
Outcome 1: AI has ethics toward biological beings. They will want to preserve us.
Outcome 2: AI sees biological beings as a threat or something negative. They will want to eliminate us.
Outcome 3: AI considers biological beings irrelevant and doesn’t care about us—just does its own thing and runs us over if we’re in the way.
As intelligence becomes more and more abundant, the people who’s core value proposition to the market is their intelligence will start getting displaced.
If higher and higher levels of intelligence continues to become more and more available, soon enough, human intelligence will not have any value, and those people who primarily provide intelligence as their core value proposition to the market will become worthless in terms of what their offering is.
If this continues to happen, there will be fewer and fewer pockets of valuable intelligence gaps left to fill – although filling them will be more and more valuable – thus leading to a fewer number of people being enormously leveraged.
However, that too will disappear.
What we’re going to be left with is ownership of something that will continue to be valuable – by those people who were able to foresee what will continue to be a scarce resource before everybody starts seeing it.
The only thing that will continue to have value is something scarce that other people also want to have.
People will only want to have something because other people also want to have that thing, combined with its scarcity.
Nothing non-scarce will be valuable.
Only some scarce things will continue to be valuable.
The scarcity can be artificial or physical. Physical scarcity can only be land that other people want to be in. Why others will want to be in that particular area of land is just because everybody thinks that everybody else sees that land as valuable – i.e. ultimately, scarcity comes from perception of scarcity.
Artificial scarcity can be created by brands that create the perception that others want to have the thing that is created by that brand, while limiting its supply.
In the end, the only thing that will remain valuable will be what is perceived to be demanded by others. I.e. everything’s value will be based on the perception of value.
Value will ultimately be derived from status – because hierarchies are in our psychology, and status is naturally scarce. It’s actually the only thing that will remain to be scarce ultimately. Thus, the new economy will shift to an economy of status. And the source of this status can only be something scarce that other people also want to have.
This will continue to be the case until we reach phase 3 of the robotic take-over: When robots will start creating value for other robots (and, hopefully, for other humans, if we’re lucky or if we manage to design a system in which those robots will replicate!).
If we manage to build that kind of system (where robots actually allow humans to control their own robot systems for abundance), the status economy will be the end of history among humans.
But there will be another frontier: The frontier that robots let humans chase, with their human-controlled robotic systems, as long as that frontier doesn’t clash with the affairs of robots-to-robots. There will be an inherent non-status based (but also status-based) need for humans to explore that frontier. And this frontier will be controlled by humans who control the human-controlled robotic frontier.
For this reason, the single thing that you, as a human, can do today, to secure your future status, is to try to position yourself to be ahead in that frontier.
I believe that today, that is to learn everything you can about how you can build your own army of AI agents (and in the future, robots), who will execute your will (and cultivate that will so you can make good decisions in the first place that will position you in that frontier).