Scarcity Value Is the Future of Value

<# Scarcity Value Is the Future of Value I posted something on Instagram the other day that got people talking. I said that traders at Greenwich Market who make their own products by hand — or dealers in antiques — have a higher value price trajectory than any leading London law firm. Bold claim? Sure. But let me walk you through why I believe it. ## The Price of Intelligence Is Going to Zero If you’ve been paying attention to what’s happening in AI, you’ll know the cost curves are insane. Not “gradually getting cheaper” insane — exponentially collapsing insane. A year ago, running a million tokens through a top-tier AI model cost serious money. Today, new models are matching or beating those benchmarks for fractions of a penny. We’re talking 30 cents per million tokens. That’s not a trend. That’s a cliff. And here’s what that means for every business that essentially sells packaged intelligence — legal advice, financial analysis, consulting, copywriting, accounting — the pricing floor is falling out from under them. Not slowly. Not incrementally. Exponentially. Most economists I listen to infuriate me because they model AI as if it’s moving incrementally. They plot neat little linear projections and talk about “gradual adoption.” But AI doesn’t move like previous technologies. The industrial revolution played out over generations. AI is compressing that same scale of disruption into years. Moore’s Law on steroids. If you don’t understand AI, you don’t understand the current state of the world. Full stop. ## It Doesn’t Matter If Companies Are Slow to Adopt This is the part most people miss. The usual defence is “but adoption is slow, people resist change, institutions move at glacial pace.” Fine. It doesn’t matter. Here’s why: pricing pressure doesn’t require universal adoption. It only requires *enough* adoption to destroy pricing power. If one law firm uses AI to do in minutes what another charges thousands for, the entire sector reprices downward. The slow adopters don’t get protected by their slowness — they get crushed by it. The company structure collapses irrespective of whether they personally chose to adopt or not. This applies to every knowledge work sector. Every single one. ## So What Holds Its Value? Things that can’t be replicated. Things that can’t be generated. Things that are irreducibly, provably, physically *made by a human being*. When intelligence becomes a commodity — and it is becoming one, fast — the things that retain and gain value are the things AI cannot produce. A hand-forged ring. A painting made with oil on canvas. An antique with two hundred years of provenance. A ceramic bowl with the thumbprint of the person who shaped it. These aren’t nostalgic luxuries. They’re the new scarcity assets. As everything digital and knowledge-based gets repriced toward zero, the things that remain genuinely scarce become relatively more valuable almost by default. Not necessarily because demand for them explodes, but because everything else collapses around them. The trajectory inverts. ## The Hard Part in the Middle I’m not naive about this. It’s going to be tough for a few years — for everyone, including traders and makers. When knowledge workers start losing income at scale, discretionary spending takes a hit. Art and handmade goods aren’t immune to that. But here’s what I keep telling my friends at the market, the ones who make beautiful jewellery by hand and earn just enough to live: *do not give up*. Do not panic. Do not drop your craft to grab a supermarket shelf-stacking job that’ll be automated in five years anyway. Because the people who hold on — who keep making, who keep building their craft through the painful middle period — those are the people who come out the other side with something genuinely valuable. Something that can’t be downloaded, generated, or commoditised. ## This Isn’t Bias. This Is Math. The exponential graphs don’t lie. The price of intelligence goes to zero. AI commoditises everything it touches. And on the other side of that, the things it *can’t* touch become the rarest, most valued things in the world. Scarcity value is the future of value. If you’re someone who makes things with your hands — who creates something real, physical, and human — you’re sitting on a trajectory that most people can’t even see yet. Don’t let go of it.