Three essays on what happens when intelligence becomes a commodity
This is a series of three essays about the same underlying shift, examined from three different angles. The premise they share is simple: high-level cognitive labor — reasoning, writing, analysis, persuasion, planning — is becoming cheap, standardized, and available on demand. Each essay asks what that means for a different part of the world.
Cheap Thinking looks at the economy. It uses the electrification of American factories as its frame, and argues that the real constraint is never the technology — it is the organizational redesign the technology demands. The productivity miracle will arrive late, because it always does.
Cheap Answers looks at knowledge and learning. It uses Diderot’s Encyclopédie as its frame, and argues that the most dangerous consequence of abundant AI is not misinformation but the illusion of understanding — the growing gap between feeling like you know something and actually knowing it.
Cheap Expertise looks at professionals — doctors, lawyers, and the knowledge workers whose value depended on knowing things their clients did not. It uses the barber-surgeon split of 1745 as its frame, and argues that the profession survives, but only the version of it that was never really about knowledge in the first place.
The essays can be read in any order. They share a lens — the economics of commoditization, the migration of value to complements and bottlenecks — but each applies it to a different question and reaches a different conclusion. Where they overlap in framework, they diverge in what they find.