The economy has long operated on a deeply entrenched belief: expertise is a scarce commodity, commanding a high price. Artificial intelligence, however, is on the verge of making that kind of intelligence as ubiquitous as air—and nearly free.
There was a time when assembling a team of PhD-level experts meant committing to a massive budget and a long waiting period. Today, all it takes is typing a few questions into a chat window, and intellectual firepower of a similar caliber is at your fingertips in seconds.
As intelligence becomes cheaper and faster, the foundational assumption underpinning our organizational structures—that human expertise is scarce and expensive—begins to crumble. When you can effectively consult an entire panel of specialists anytime, anywhere, it will fundamentally reshape how companies are structured, how we innovate, and even how each of us learns and makes decisions. The pressing question facing every individual and organization is this: In a world where intelligence itself has become readily accessible and almost free, what will you do?
A History of Cheaper Intelligence: The Acceleration of Civilization
This isn’t the first time we’ve witnessed a dramatic plunge in the “cost of knowledge.” In the mid-15th century, the printing press drastically reduced the expense of disseminating information. Before its invention, books and documents were painstakingly copied by hand, a task performed by highly trained scribes—who were themselves scarce talents.
Once this bottleneck was removed, Europe underwent transformative upheaval: the Reformation reshaped religious life, literacy rates soared paving the way for universal elementary education, and scientific thought spread widely through printed materials. The biggest beneficiaries were commercially astute nations like the Netherlands and England, which entered their respective "Golden Ages," with the latter leveraging this advantage into centuries of global leadership.
Thereafter, mass literacy combined with public education, making intelligence more widely available and fueling the Industrial Revolution. Factory labor became increasingly specialized, and complex divisions of labor emerged as engines of economic growth. Countries with higher male literacy rates in the late 18th century were among the first to industrialize; by the late 19th century, the most technologically advanced economies were also those with the most literate populations. As workers continuously acquired new skills, labor markets fostered increasingly specialized professions, creating a virtuous cycle of “growth → learning → further growth” that continues to this day.
The birth of the Internet then dramatically reduced the cost of accessing reliable information on an unprecedented scale. In my childhood, researching a new topic meant walking to the local library with a list of subjects—a process that could easily take half a day. Back then, knowledge was neither cheap nor easy to obtain.
Now, artificial intelligence is taking up the baton, writing a brand new chapter in this millennia-long history of “cheaper intelligence”—and this chapter is likely to determine the next phase of our economic and intellectual evolution.