Labor Is Cheap
When talent is infinite and tireless, you’re not competing. You’re curating.
Labor Is Cheap
When talent is infinite and tireless, you’re not competing. You’re curating.
Labor Is Cheap
When talent is infinite and tireless, you’re not competing. You’re curating.
This episode will cover:
Abundance makes talent less valuable
Automation reduces the need for human labor
Competition fades when output is infinite
Curation becomes the scarce skill
Who decides the value of labor in a new era
Labor is cheap, and that changes the equation. When machines can work endlessly, the value of effort collapses. Talent is no longer scarce when it can be replicated at scale, day and night, without pause.
The old idea of competition begins to break down. It is no longer about who can produce the most or even who can produce the best. The shift is from creation to curation: what we choose to keep, what we give attention to, and what we allow to shape culture.
Some work will simply disappear. Not because people failed to adapt, but because there is not enough left to do. Headlines focus on the number of jobs lost, but the silence is about what comes next. UBI is mentioned as a solution, but rarely with detail. What would it look like in practice, and what if it falls short.
This raises a deeper question that has never been answered in human history. What determines the value of a person’s labor? The same task can be cheap in one place and costly in another. Some people risk their lives for little pay while others are rewarded handsomely for working in comfort.
The value of labor is not an absolute fact. It is a perception, a decision, a system that society agrees to follow. In the era of infinite output, who will get to decide what labor is worth? Can we redefine it for equity, for community builders, for care work? Or will the system tilt further toward unfairness and utilitarian logic?
We need to decide now what is important and what is valuable.
If we do not, the price of our labor will be set for us, printed on a tag we never chose.
This episode will cover:
Abundance makes talent less valuable
Automation reduces the need for human labor
Competition fades when output is infinite
Curation becomes the scarce skill
Who decides the value of labor in a new era
Labor is cheap, and that changes the equation. When machines can work endlessly, the value of effort collapses. Talent is no longer scarce when it can be replicated at scale, day and night, without pause.
The old idea of competition begins to break down. It is no longer about who can produce the most or even who can produce the best. The shift is from creation to curation: what we choose to keep, what we give attention to, and what we allow to shape culture.
Some work will simply disappear. Not because people failed to adapt, but because there is not enough left to do. Headlines focus on the number of jobs lost, but the silence is about what comes next. UBI is mentioned as a solution, but rarely with detail. What would it look like in practice, and what if it falls short.
This raises a deeper question that has never been answered in human history. What determines the value of a person’s labor? The same task can be cheap in one place and costly in another. Some people risk their lives for little pay while others are rewarded handsomely for working in comfort.
The value of labor is not an absolute fact. It is a perception, a decision, a system that society agrees to follow. In the era of infinite output, who will get to decide what labor is worth? Can we redefine it for equity, for community builders, for care work? Or will the system tilt further toward unfairness and utilitarian logic?
We need to decide now what is important and what is valuable.
If we do not, the price of our labor will be set for us, printed on a tag we never chose.
This episode will cover:
Abundance makes talent less valuable
Automation reduces the need for human labor
Competition fades when output is infinite
Curation becomes the scarce skill
Who decides the value of labor in a new era
Labor is cheap, and that changes the equation. When machines can work endlessly, the value of effort collapses. Talent is no longer scarce when it can be replicated at scale, day and night, without pause.
The old idea of competition begins to break down. It is no longer about who can produce the most or even who can produce the best. The shift is from creation to curation: what we choose to keep, what we give attention to, and what we allow to shape culture.
Some work will simply disappear. Not because people failed to adapt, but because there is not enough left to do. Headlines focus on the number of jobs lost, but the silence is about what comes next. UBI is mentioned as a solution, but rarely with detail. What would it look like in practice, and what if it falls short.
This raises a deeper question that has never been answered in human history. What determines the value of a person’s labor? The same task can be cheap in one place and costly in another. Some people risk their lives for little pay while others are rewarded handsomely for working in comfort.
The value of labor is not an absolute fact. It is a perception, a decision, a system that society agrees to follow. In the era of infinite output, who will get to decide what labor is worth? Can we redefine it for equity, for community builders, for care work? Or will the system tilt further toward unfairness and utilitarian logic?
We need to decide now what is important and what is valuable.
If we do not, the price of our labor will be set for us, printed on a tag we never chose.