“The work of the artist is to make the invisible visible.” — Paul Klee
At the dawn of every technological age, humanity seems to ask the same enduring question: What will the machine take from us? It is a reasonable question, perhaps even an inevitable one.
Every breakthrough arrives carrying equal measures of promise and unease, inviting us to imagine not only what we might gain, but what we might lose. Yet history has a subtle sense of irony. More often than not, the greatest inventions have not diminished our humanity, but rather challenged us to redefine it, revealing that our most valuable qualities are rarely those that technology can replace.
Imagine, for a moment, the last artisan. Not the last person who can use a tool. Not the last person who can make something by hand. The world will still have sculptors, architects, designers, writers, engineers, chefs and musicians. The last artisan is something else.
The last artisan is the person who remembers that making is an act of meaning.
In a world where anything can be generated, they understand that not everything deserves to exist. They stand before infinite possibilities and do something increasingly rare:
They choose.
They choose carefully.
They choose deliberately.
They choose with responsibility.
Their greatest skill is not speed, but discernment. Their greatest advantage is not access to better tools. Everyone will have tools. Their advantage is knowing what the tools are for.
The biggest challenge and opportunity (at the same time) of AI may be that the more capable machines become, the more important distinctively human qualities become. When machines were weak, humans were valued for what they could do. When machines become powerful, humans will increasingly be valued for why they do those things. The center of gravity is shifting. From execution to intention. From production to purpose. From outcome to meaning.
Far from being replaced, creativity is, in fact, refined. After all, it was never just about filling the world with more stuff, but rather about finding rare ideas, stories, and possibilities that make the world worth preserving. The tools may change, but the human instinct to discover meaning remains timeless. A civilization is not remembered for creating the most objects. It is remembered for creating objects, ideas, and experiences that changed the way human beings understand themselves.
A medieval stonemason building a cathedral, for example, could spend a lifetime working on a structure they would never see completed. From a purely economic perspective, the project was inefficient. The return on investment was uncertain. The timeline was unreasonable. The labor was excessive.
Yet those cathedrals remain among humanity’s greatest achievements. Why? Because they were never merely buildings. They were expressions of belief. They represented a society saying: This matters enough to dedicate generations to it.
Today, AI may allow us to build faster than any generation before us. Yet speed alone does not create significance. A cathedral is not meaningful because it contains many stones. It is meaningful because every stone was placed with intention.
For centuries, we celebrated the maker, the inventor, the builder, the producer, the creator. And rightly so. But abundance changes the role of the creator. The future increasingly belongs to the selector.The person who can distinguish. The person who can prioritize. The person who can recognize quality before it becomes obvious. The person who can look at ten thousand possible futures and identify the one worth pursuing.
Albert A. Bartlett’s observation, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” was never simply about mathematics, it was about perception, prediction, and the limits of human intuition.
Humans naturally tend to think in linear terms. We expect tomorrow to resemble today, progress to arrive in steady increments, change to unfold at a pace we can comfortably comprehend.
Arithmetic feels natural: 10, 20, 30, 40. Exponential growth follows a different logic: 10, 20, 40, 80, 160, 320. For a while, the two seem almost indistinguishable. Then, almost imperceptibly, one leaves the other far behind, only to reshape the world in ways hard to predict.
In the age of AI, Bartlett’s insight has become more relevant than ever. AI is advancing through compounding improvements in computing power, data, algorithms, and human collaboration. The challenge is not only understanding what AI can do today, but recognizing how quickly its capabilities may evolve when small advances build upon one another.
Our difficulty in grasping exponential growth can lead us to underestimate both opportunities and risks. We may dismiss emerging technologies because their early impact seems limited, only to find that they have reached a transformative scale.
Understanding the exponential function, therefore, is not just a mathematical skill, it is a way of thinking that helps us prepare for a future where change happens faster than our instincts expect.
***
History is often told through its inventions.
We remember the wheel, the compass, the steam engine, electricity, the microchip and now, AI. Yet inventions, remarkable as they are, are merely the visible landmarks of a deeper journey. Beneath every technological breakthrough lies a quieter story, the migration of scarcity.
Every civilization has been defined less by what it possessed than by what it lacked. Scarcity has always been the silent architect of economies, institutions and culture. It determines what societies value, where they invest, what they reward and, ultimately, how they imagine progress itself.
The history of innovation is therefore not just a chronicle of machines, it is more a map of humanity’s steadily vanishing constraints, where each breakthrough redraws the boundaries of what is possible.
Technology has never abolished scarcity. It has only persuaded it to move. To understand the significance of today’s AI, we must first understand this recurring pattern.
The First Economy: Survival. For most of human existence, survival consumed nearly every waking hour. Food was uncertain. Shelter was fragile. Disease was common. The vast majority of people worked not to get rich, but simply to stay alive.
The Agricultural Revolution transformed this reality. Irrigation, domestication and organized cultivation did not eliminate hunger, but they dramatically reduced its tyranny. The harvest became more predictable. Permanent settlements emerged. Surplus food made possible something previously unimaginable, specialists.
Once not everyone needed to farm, some people could become architects, priests, philosophers, merchants or artists. Civilization itself was born from surplus. Agriculture did more than feed people. It created time. That surplus of time became the raw material from which culture, science and governance were fashioned.
Scarcity had moved. No longer centered solely on food, it began to concentrate around land, ownership and political power. The question was no longer simply, „Can we survive?” It became, „Who controls the surplus?”
The Second Economy: Production. Centuries later, another migration occurred. The Industrial Revolution transformed human labor in much the same way agriculture transformed human muscle. Steam engines multiplied physical effort. Factories standardized production. Machines compressed weeks of manual work into hours. For the first time, prosperity became closely linked to productivity.
The heroes of this era were engineers, industrialists and manufacturers. Society rewarded those capable of producing more goods, more cheaply and more consistently than anyone before them. The defining economic challenge was production. How could one make more steel? More textiles? More furniture? More books? The great factories of Manchester, Detroit and Essen were monuments to an age in which scarcity meant insufficient output.
Industrialization did not eliminate craftsmanship, it simply discovered that economies scale more gracefully when certainty, rather than judgment, does the heavy lifting. Henry Ford’s moving assembly line did not produce finer craftsmen. It made the craftsman economically unnecessary for countless objects. Excellence was no longer measured by the discernment of the maker but by the reliability of the system. Uniformity became a virtue. Predictability became profitable. Repetition became the currency of efficiency.
David Pye, in „The Nature and Art of Workmanship“, offered a distinction that now feels almost prophetic. The „workmanship of certainty” is designed so that the quality of the result is predetermined, the process itself guarantees the outcome. The „workmanship of risk” is altogether different. Here, quality remains in the hands, eyes, and judgment of the maker until the very last moment. Every movement carries a possibility. Every decision quietly rewrites what comes next.
Yet certainty, the more perfectly it succeeds, the more conspicuous becomes everything it cannot manufacture. When every chair is indistinguishable from the next, the chair that bears the faint hesitation of a blade begins to whisper. When flawless repetition becomes ordinary, a subtle asymmetry becomes memorable.
Pye would likely remind us that these are not imperfections in spite of workmanship, they are the unmistakable signatures of the workmanship of risk. They are evidence that someone was present, that intelligence was exercised in real time rather than embedded long ago in a machine, a jig, or a production line. The value lies not in irregularity itself, but in the living discernment from which it arises.
The effort heuristic explains why we instinctively value what cost something to create. However, the deeper lesson only emerges when the effort itself becomes cheap. Luxury has long understood this. A Patek Philippe does not merely tell time. A bespoke suit does not merely cover the body. A Michelin-starred meal does not merely satisfy hunger. They communicate something increasingly rare: someone cared enough to make this well.
Becouse people are not buying an object, they are buying a reduction in uncertainty. While leather ages, steel corrodes, and gold is a commodity, what commands a premium is everything that cannot be copied at the press of a button: lineage, accumulated reputation, craftsmanship refined across generations, and the credibility earned through consistency rather than claimed through marketing.
And so, in every age, abundance cheapens the visible, and scarcity exalts the invisible. That’s why luxury is rarely limited to utility, and it’s more about visible scarcity. Not merely the scarcity of materials, but the scarcity of patience, the scarcity of taste, the scarcity of attention, the scarcity of restraint. Above all, the scarcity of human judgment.
The Third Economy: Information. Two centuries later, another revolution arrived. This one did not amplify muscle, it amplified the mind. Computers extended our capacity to think. The internet collapsed geography. Search engines made knowledge searchable in milliseconds. Information, once locked inside libraries, universities, and institutions, became available to anyone with a connection.
Once again, a familiar prediction emerged. Scarcity, many declared, was over. Knowledge had become free. If everyone could access information, then surely information itself would lose its value.
And yet history rarely eliminates scarcity, it simply moves it. Long before smartphones, infinite scrolling, or social media feeds, Nobel laureate Herbert Simon saw what was coming, „A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Few ideas have aged more gracefully. Simon understood a truth that has only become clearer with time: every new piece of information is not merely an addition to our knowledge, it is a competitor for our attention. Every article, every opinion, every notification, every recommendation enters an invisible auction, bidding for the few moments of focus we have available.
The digital economy quietly revealed one of the most important lessons of modern history, transformative technologies rarely create the world’s knowledge, they change how we access, navigate, and make sense of it. And every time that happens, value shifts.
The winners were rarely those who produced the most information, but those who organized it, curated it, and made it useful. Abundance did not destroy value, it relocated it, from creation alone to curation, discernment, and clarity.
When everything becomes easier to produce, what becomes scarce is knowing what actually deserves attention. This shift becomes even more pronounced when viewed through the lens of exponential growth.
Change rarely sends a calendar invite. It feels gradually right up until it feels inevitable. The digital world follows this exact curve. Every day, millions of new articles, videos, podcasts, research papers, opinions, and analyzes flood the ecosystem. The volume grows exponentially, while our capacity to evaluate it remains stubbornly human. The result is an environment expanding far faster than any individual, or any organization, can meaningfully process.
And this is where Simon’s observation evolves from insightful to profound. A wealth of information does not simply divide our attention, it devalues it. Every additional choice competes with every existing one. Every recommendation makes every previous recommendation slightly harder to find. Every explanation enters an increasingly crowded marketplace where abundance itself becomes the obstacle.
Information compounds exponentially, attention does not. Our capacity to focus today is remarkably similar to what it was generations ago. We still wake up with the same twenty-four hours. We still possess the same finite cognitive bandwidth. The exponential curve transformed the supply of information, but it left the supply of attention untouched.
Understanding exponential growth in the information economy is a way to understand the modern human condition. It explains why information so easily outpaces comprehension, why unlimited choice often produces paralysis instead of freedom, and why abundance, left unmanaged, can create confusion rather than wisdom.
Looking back, the defining challenge of this era was never producing more information. It was cultivating the wisdom to discern what truly deserved our attention and the discipline to give it. We eventually realized that the scarcest commodity was never knowledge. It was clarity.
The Fourth Economy: Possibility. Every great technological revolution has done the same thing, it has taken something scarce and made it abundant. AI is now doing something even more extraordinary, it’s making execution abundant.
With a sentence, entire worlds emerge. What once demanded years of apprenticeship, specialized knowledge, and painstaking effort increasingly begins with a simple conversation with a machine.
It is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. It is also the beginning of one of its greatest economic transitions. Because economies are never transformed by technology alone, they are transformed by the migration of scarcity.
For centuries, execution was scarce. Knowledge had to be acquired. Skill had to be earned. Mastery required patience. Time itself acted as nature’s gatekeeper, separating imagination from reality.
Execution created value because it was difficult. Today AI changes that equation. If everyone can produce elegant presentations, elegance ceases to be exceptional. If everyone can generate breathtaking images, beauty alone loses its scarcity. If everyone can write competent software, competence itself becomes invisible.
Excellence does not disappear. It simply moves.
Decades before computers even appeared on the horizon, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges conceived an idea that now seems almost a spoiler for our era of AI. A library containing every possible book. Not merely every book ever written, but every book that could ever be written. Every masterpiece. Every forgotten poem. Every scientific discovery. Every philosophical revelation. Every alternate history. Every translation…Every version of your own life, told in infinitely many ways.
Alongside them would exist every typo, every contradiction, every convincing lie, every meaningless permutation of language.
At first glance, such a library feels like the ultimate expression of knowledge. And yet Borges understood the opposite. Because when everything exists, finding what matters becomes almost impossible. Every masterpiece is mathematically buried beneath an infinite ocean of mediocrity. Every profound truth is surrounded by countless plausible falsehoods. Infinity does not create clarity, it creates noise.
Generative AI is rapidly becoming our Library of Babel, not because it lacks intelligence, but because it possesses an almost unlimited capacity to produce it. For the first time in history, our greatest constraint is no longer the inability to create, it’s the inability to choose.
Scarcity has always determined value. Not because scarcity is inherently good, but because abundance changes what matters. The modern supermarket offers hundreds of breakfast cereals, yet many shoppers stand paralyzed before the shelf. Streaming platforms contain more films than a person could watch in several lifetimes, yet millions spend half an hour searching for something to watch. The internet has placed nearly all of humanity’s knowledge within reach of a pocket-sized device, yet confusion has not disappeared, it has multiplied.
The problem was never a lack of options. It was our limited capacity to navigate them. AI accelerates this paradox to an unprecedented scale. It does not simply increase supply, it radically lowers the cost of possibility itself. In doing so, it transforms one of economics’ oldest assumptions: scarcity no longer governs production, it governs selection.
This is how AI triggers the next migration. As creation becomes abundant, the value shifts from creation to choice. Not production, but judgment. Not limitless generation, but taste. In a world where almost anything can exist, the rarest ability is deciding what deserves to exist at all. The question is no longer „Can we make this?” It is „Should we?” That may become the defining economic question of the AI age.
When supply approaches infinity. Classical economics begins with scarcity. From Adam Smith to Lionel Robbins, economic thought has rested on a simple observation: resources are finite while human wants are effectively infinite. Value emerges because obtaining something requires sacrifice.
AI quietly inverts one side of this equation. It does not eliminate scarcity altogether (human time, energy and attention remain stubbornly finite) but it dramatically expands the supply of creative outputs.
One prompt becomes ten concepts. Ten become a hundred. A hundred becomes a thousand. The marginal cost of producing another variation approaches zero. This matters because economics is not merely concerned with production, it is concerned with relative value.
A glass of water is priceless in the desert and almost worthless in the middle of a rainstorm. Gold is valuable not because of its intrinsic beauty but because it is difficult to obtain. Scarcity and value have always danced together.
As AI floods the world with competent words, images, music and ideas, technical production begins to resemble water after the rain. Still useful. Still necessary. But no longer rare. And what is abundant cannot, by itself, command a premium.
The abundance paradox. Paradoxically, abundance creates its own forms of deprivation. The internet promised unlimited information. What it produced was information overload. Social media promised unlimited connection. What many experienced was social fragmentation.
AI promises unlimited creativity. Its unintended consequence may be creative saturation. This is not a failure of technology. It is a consequence of human cognition. Psychologist Barry Schwartz, in „The Paradox of Choice“, argued that while choice is essential to freedom, excessive choice often diminishes satisfaction. Faced with too many alternatives, people become less confident, less decisive and more anxious about what they may have overlooked.
The problem is not simply that there are many options. It is that every additional option imposes a cognitive cost. Each possibility demands evaluation. Each alternative competes for attention. Each decision consumes mental energy.
Everything, until, the abundance of possibilities becomes a tax on judgment. The question is no longer whether we can generate ideas. It is whether we can meaningfully distinguish between them. Every marketplace is a battle between signal and noise. Every museum separates enduring works from forgotten ones. Every editor decides which voices deserve publication. Every venture capitalist asks which of thousands of founders deserves investment. Every consumer wonders which product is genuinely worth buying.
The more information available, the more valuable filtering becomes.
AI increases the volume of the signal. It also increases the volume of noise. The ratio between brilliance and banality does not necessarily improve simply because production accelerates. Quantity is not quality multiplied, it is possibility multiplied. And possibility, without discernment, is indistinguishable from chaos.
That’s why today editors are becoming more important. Curators are becoming more important. Creative directors are becoming more important. Brand strategists are becoming more important. Collectors are becoming more important. Not because they produce the artefacts themselves, but because they provide something machines cannot easily automate, judgment. In an economy overflowing with creation, curation becomes creation.
In his 1935 essay „The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction diminished the „aura” of original works of art, the unique presence that comes from authenticity and singularity.
Digital technology didn’t so much challenge his thesis as put it on fast-forward, making perfect copies instantaneous, ubiquitous, and virtually free but AI takes the story one step further: it doesn’t merely reproduce existing works but generates convincing new ones at scale. If mechanical reproduction blurred the line between the original and the copy, generative AI occasionally seems to wonder whether the distinction is worth keeping around at all.
Ironically, this may be exactly what restores value to something many assumed technology would eventually erase: the unmistakable presence of a human being, the visible brushstroke, the handwritten correction, the improvised remark that no algorithm was instructed to make, the subtle imperfection that signals intention rather than error.
As machines become increasingly adept at producing polished outputs, traces of genuine human authorship begin to function less like flaws and more like certificates of authenticity. In an age of infinite replication and effortless generation, origin becomes a luxury and authenticity, once taken for granted, starts looking suspiciously like a premium feature.
It is the return of the human signature, not merely as a name attached to a work, but as a visible trace of judgment, intention, and presence. What once seemed incidental now becomes meaningful. The marks of authorship that technology struggles to imitate (taste, restraint, serendipity, and even the occasional imperfection) become signals of authenticity.
Towards the economy of judgment. We are entering an era in which producing another option is increasingly inexpensive, while selecting the right option becomes increasingly difficult. This marks a civilizational transition as significant as the shift from agriculture to industry or from industry to information.
The defining professionals of the next century may not be those who generate the most ideas, but those who recognize which ideas possess coherence, integrity and consequence. For abundance does not simplify decision-making, it magnifies its importance. AI has not ended the economics of scarcity, it has simply carried scarcity into its final and perhaps most deeply human domain, judgment.
And it is there, in the difficult space between infinite possibility and deliberate choice, where the last artisan will discover his next renaissance.
The future may contain machines capable of producing works indistinguishable from those created by humans. That possibility should not frighten us, it should clarify us.
Because the deepest value of human creation has never been only the final product. It has been the human journey behind it. The years of practice. The failures. The doubts. The discoveries. The moments of insight. The invisible accumulation of experience that transforms a simple act into a meaningful one.
A machine may one day create a painting that moves us. And yet, humanity will still ask: Who decided this should exist? What intention shaped it? What does it reveal? What does it mean? The human signature is not merely the hand, it is the conscience behind the hand.
The final choice.The story of AI, so often framed as a story of replacement, may ultimately be better understood as a story of elevation. AI will undoubtedly automate tasks, commoditize many technical skills, and reshape entire professions. Yet, in doing so, it also nudges us towards the level where our most distinctive contributions have always resided.
As routine execution becomes increasingly inexpensive, judgment becomes more valuable. As information becomes abundant, wisdom becomes scarce. And as machines grow ever more capable of producing answers, the truly human advantage lies in asking better questions, exercising discernment, caring and creating meaning.
The Industrial Revolution taught us to fear empty factories. The AI Revolution asks us to fear full ones. Not factories overflowing with steel, but minds overflowing with possibilities. The last artisan will not be the person who makes the most. They will be the person who understands why anything should be done at all. And perhaps that is the greatest gift AI can offer humanity: not a replacement for our creativity, but a reminder of its true purpose.
To choose carefully. To create meaning. To make the invisible visible.
To leave behind not necessarily more things, but better reasons for things to exist.
***
In a world where everything is available, perspective, it seems like it will be the only true luxury. It cannot be downloaded, outsourced, or accelerated. It is earned through experience, shaped by values, refined by taste, and protected by the discipline to say, “Not this. Not yet. Not that way.” It is what turns products into icons, decisions into strategy, brands into meaning, and moments into experiences people carry with them.
If you understand that a coherent point of view is becoming one of the most valuable business assets of the next decade, this might be for you. I’m looking to collaborate with founders, leaders, and curious thinkers who want to explore how businesses can use AI not to become more generic, but more distinctive.
Bring your convictions. Bring your curiosity. Bring your favorite hill to die on (we’ll probably find a better one together) and keep it handy!
