The Silent Suffering of the Blocked Idea
There is a quiet suffering we rarely name: the idea that stays trapped in the mind because the path to it seems too long. I remember how real this was a few years ago. A simple WordPress website. A few lines of code that refused to work, entire hours lost hunting for a syntax error. It wasn't about time or money. It was that moment when imagination hit a wall, and you remained on the other side, looking at something you couldn't yet reach.
Even the most skilled people in the field went through the same collapses. Just at a larger scale of their ambition.
What Broke the Pattern
Then something broke the pattern. The first image models appeared, then text models, and it wasn't just speed that changed. Technology stopped merely executing faster what you already knew how to do. It started helping you see more clearly what you wanted to do from the beginning. Barriers I never thought I'd cross became passable, almost overnight.
The Question That Matters
The question that actually matters is a different one: if the transformation is this profound at the individual level, why do markets continue to measure it as a simple matter of efficiency?
Execution Becomes a Commodity, Orchestration Remains Human
Execution time, technical skill, the patience to learn a new tool. All these things, once expensive, are becoming nearly free. But value doesn't disappear with the old price, it shifts, just as water always finds a new crack. What remains scarce now is what cannot be produced through computation: judgment under real uncertainty, trust built over time, access to something that exists physically, not just in probabilities.
And here lies a distinction most people miss. Execution becomes a common commodity, like electricity. Orchestration, the capacity to decide what's worth building and to take responsibility for it, remains the only place where the human hasn't yet been replaced by his own tool.
The Electricity Parallel and Its Flaw
You often hear the parallel with electricity or telephony, collapsed prices that created markets larger than the ones they replaced. It sounds reassuring. But it has a hole that few stop to examine: electricity replaced candles, not the bargaining power of millions of people at once. This time, the speed of labor substitution far exceeds the speed at which new markets capable of absorbing it emerge. The gap between those two speeds isn't a technical detail, it's the entire stakes.
Who Wins and Who Loses
Someone wins enormously from this cost collapse. Usually the one who owns the compute, the data, the models. In parallel, a growing mass of people remains for whom the old competence no longer holds market value, and the new competence hasn't yet appeared in its place.
An Economic Engineering Observation, Not an Ideological Position
Many avoid this conclusion because it sounds too political for a discussion about technology, but here it is. We're not talking about a temporary adjustment. We're talking about a rupture that won't resolve itself through the hope that the new market will appear in time for everyone. It resolves through decision.
I don't say this as an ideological position, but as a simple economic engineering observation: where capital absorbs the gain faster than the mechanisms that would balance the loss of labor's bargaining power emerge, someone must deliberately design the value transfer. Whether as basic income or a direct tax on inference capital at scale, the principle remains the same: nothing in today's market architecture does this on its own.
The Real Question
Redistribution will happen, in one form or another. The pressure described above cannot be absorbed indefinitely without a correction. The real question isn't whether, but who designs it, the state, the market, or no one, and what happens to everyone caught in the middle if the answer is "no one in time."