Someone ought to build a marketplace for human judgment (taste).
As AI continues to drive down the cost of creation, the real bottleneck in future knowledge work won’t be AI-inference tokens; it will be human-judgment tokens.
The ability to discern quality, to exercise taste, to make the right call—these will be the scarce resources that matter.
I think this business will look like some combination of Fiverr/Upwork and GLG, but I doubt it will be either of them.
Where value accrues
If the cost of creation approaches zero, much of the economic value may consolidate in two places:
- Human creativity and judgment – These will command a significant premium due to their limited relative supply. While AI can churn out near-infinite work product, human judgment—the ability to discern what is good, what is compelling, what is worth pursuing—remains finite.
- The orchestrator/allocator – Likely an AI-augmented human whose job is to “press the button.” This person, effectively the seat of agency, directs AI and human talent toward valuable creative outcomes.
Why aren’t these the same people?
The archetypal artist and the archetypal producer serve different roles and have different strengths.
- The highest-taste “artists” can specialize and maximize economic value through their ability to exercise judgment—deciding what is beautiful, novel, or important.
- The producers, meanwhile, construct and manage systems of humans + AI, ensuring outcomes are achieved and holding accountability. They own risk and are compensated accordingly.
Judgment marketplaces
Historically:
- Artists have often been handicapped by their laziness.
- Producers have often been handicapped by their lack of creativity.
But in the future, a combination of artists, producers, and AI could lead to an explosion in high-quality creation.
Someone ought to build the unlocking platform.