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When I was 7 years old I was asked by my father what went into the price of a sandwich. Considering it carefully, I answered.
The lettuce, the tomato, the bread and the meat.
I did not consider correctly. I was short quite a few costs as my father was eager to point out. I had forgot the labor of the worker, the rent of the land, the marketing costs of the chain. I wasn’t seeing the full picture.
Today we are all making a similar mistake with AI. We are not considering what cannot be considered. As foreign to the 7 year old as these excess charges were, so are the downstream affects of AI.
In 1850, if you had told a teamster that his horse and carriage would soon be obsolete, he would have envisioned a world of mass starvation for men of his skill. He could grasp the concept of a faster carriage, but he could not conceive of the interstate highway system, the suburban real estate market, or the roadside motel industry. These were not just new products; they were an entirely new social architecture.
We are currently in the teamster’s shoes. We see AI automating the ingredients of our current economy—the writing, the coding, the data entry—and we fear the void. But history shows that humanity doesn't fall into the void; it builds a floor over it.
Karl Marx looked at the dark satanic mills of the 19th century and saw a terminal point. He argued that as the means of production became more efficient, capital would consolidate and labor would become a worthless commodity. He believed capitalism would eventually eat itself because it would run out of things for people to do.
Marx was wrong because he viewed human utility as a fixed pie. He didn't understand that technology doesn't just subtract labor; it changes the nature of what we consider valuable.
When the mechanical loom made fabric cheap, we didn't stop buying clothes. Instead, we invented the fashion industry. We created brand management, retail psychology, and textile engineering.
We moved from a world where everyone owned two outfits to a world where millions of people are employed in the cycle of seasonal trends.
In the age of the steam engine, "handmade" was a sign of poverty. Today, it is a luxury. We are already seeing a shift where the human touch—the artisanal, the face-to-face, and the physically present—is becoming the high-margin sector of the economy.
Every time we automate a simple task, we move the human to a more complex one. We didn't stop needing accountants when Excel was invented... we simply started asking accountants to perform much more sophisticated financial modeling.
The 7-year-old misses the rent and the marketing because they are abstractions. Similarly, we struggle to see the jobs of 2040 because they rely on problems we haven't even encountered yet. We might see the rise of Personal Data Stewards, who manage the interaction between our private lives and public AI models, or Reality Architects, who ensure that the virtual spaces we inhabit are psychologically grounded.
The world works itself out because humans are fundamentally restless. We do not tolerate a vacuum of purpose, we seek higher function always.
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