The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and above all by the disenchantment of the world ~ Max Weber, Science as a Vocation
Intelligence too cheap to meter.
The phrase is from Matt Webb’s essay about artificial intelligence. It borrows from an earlier technological dream. In the 1950s, nuclear advocates predicted that electricity would become so abundant it would be too cheap to meter. Webb revived the phrase to describe a new possibility: intelligence itself becoming abundant.
The suggestion is simple but profound. What happens when intelligence becomes extremely cheap?
When the cost of intelligence collapses, the story is not that AI tools get better. The story is that intelligence stops being a product and starts becoming infrastructure.
We have seen this pattern before. Electricity was once scarce and carefully rationed. Computing power once required entire rooms of machines. Storage and bandwidth were expensive luxuries. Then the curves bent, the costs collapsed, and these capabilities disappeared into the background of civilization.
Intelligence now seems to be following the same trajectory.
Most of what we call AI products today will likely dissolve into features inside everything. Writing assistants, coding tools, research bots, marketing generators. When intelligence becomes cheap enough, these stop being standalone services and start behaving like spellcheck. Useful, everywhere, and no longer something you consciously think about.
The real leverage will shift to systems that move atoms, coordinate resources, or shape real-world outcomes: logistics networks, robotics, healthcare workflows, energy systems, and infrastructure.
Intelligence alone is not an advantage. Intelligence connected to reality is.
The largest economic gains will likely come where intelligence meets the physical world: factories, laboratories, supply chains, and energy systems.
At the same time, expertise itself becomes strange. When knowledge retrieval becomes trivial, value moves away from remembering information and toward judgment. The scarce resource becomes the deciding factor in what problem actually matters. In a world of abundant answers, the real skill becomes asking questions that are worth answering.
Organizations will compress as well. Much of the corporate structure exists because information processing is slow and expensive. When intelligence becomes abundant, small teams can operate with the leverage that previously required entire departments.
But there is a twist. When intelligence becomes cheap, content becomes infinite. Articles, videos, software, analysis, and design are all easy to generate. The scarce resource shifts again, this time to attention and credibility. Trust networks begin to matter more than raw information.
And through all of this, the hardest problem remains stubbornly human.
Civilization’s bottleneck has rarely been intelligence. It has been coordination, incentives, and judgment.
The strange possibility ahead is a world overflowing with intelligence but still dependent on wisdom. The technology is becoming abundant, but deciding what is worth doing with it remains a deeply human responsibility.
Jobs will not simply disappear, but they will reorganize. Roles built primarily around routine analysis, information synthesis, documentation, or standardized decision support will shrink because intelligence will handle these cheaply and instantly. Work that remains valuable will cluster around areas where reality pushes back: operating systems in the physical world, managing risk, interpreting ambiguous situations, building trust, negotiating incentives, and making irreversible decisions.
Organizations will flatten dramatically. If intelligence can generate reports, simulations, forecasts, and operational recommendations instantly, the layers built for collecting & processing information lose much of their reason to exist. Many companies will begin to look less like pyramids and more like small, highly capable teams coordinating networks of automated systems.
Governments will face a different challenge. Policy institutions were designed for a world where analysis was slow and expertise was scarce. When intelligence becomes abundant, the limiting factor in governance becomes legitimacy and coordination rather than analysis.
Society will experience a shift in the meaning of skill. When generating ideas, writing documents, or building prototypes becomes easy, the emphasis moves to taste, credibility, and responsibility. People who can filter signal from noise, build trusted reputations, and guide collective attention toward meaningful problems become disproportionately valuable.
Education likely needs to adapt as well. Memorization and procedural learning were optimized for a world where knowledge retrieval was expensive. In a world where intelligence is abundant, education must tilt toward conceptual understanding, problem framing, ethical reasoning, and the ability to work effectively with intelligent systems.
Cheap intelligence also accelerates scientific discovery. When reasoning, simulation, and hypothesis generation become inexpensive, fields such as biology, materials science, chemistry, and climate modeling will experience rapid progress. Scientific exploration itself could become dramatically faster.
Yet technological revolutions rarely produce smooth transitions. Labor markets often experience long adjustment cycles as new capabilities disrupt existing roles before new industries emerge. Cheap intelligence can create periods of instability before societies discover new equilibria.
There is also a geopolitical layer. If intelligence becomes infrastructure, it becomes strategic infrastructure. Nations compete over semiconductor supply chains, computing clusters, and the energy systems that power them.
Another pressure point is informational stability. When intelligence makes it trivial to generate persuasive narratives, synthetic media, and large volumes of content, societies face a massive challenge of verification. Maintaining a shared understanding of reality becomes harder when convincing information can be produced at zero cost.
More broadly, history shows a recurring pattern.
When a capability becomes extremely cheap, the bottleneck moves somewhere else.
Cheap electricity shifted the constraint to machinery and industrial design.
Cheap computing shifted the constraint to software and systems thinking.
Cheap information shifted the constraint to attention.
Cheap intelligence moves the constraint to coordination, trust, legitimacy, and judgment.
If that pattern holds, the real story of intelligence becoming too cheap to meter will not be about machines becoming smarter. It is about how human institutions evolve to handle a world where thinking itself is no longer the scarce resource.
The practical implication is subtle but important. In a world where intelligence becomes abundant, the advantage shifts away from possessing information and toward exercising judgment. The ability to frame problems, evaluate outputs, and take responsibility for decisions becomes more valuable than the ability to generate analysis.
Cheap intelligence ultimately reveals that the rarest resource in civilization is not intelligence itself, but sound judgment exercised under uncertainty.
There is also a deeper historical thread running underneath this shift. More than a century ago, Max Weber argued that a long process of rationalization defines modern society: the replacement of tradition, intuition, and authority with calculation, rules, and systems of analysis.
If that diagnosis was correct, the arrival of abundant machine intelligence represents a new stage in that process.
But that is a larger story about modernity itself, and it deserves its own exploration. I will return to that question in a follow-up piece.