The Scarcity of Significance

Imagine two people standing at the summit of a mountain. One has spent three days climbing, carrying equipment, navigating difficult terrain, and overcoming physical and mental challenges to reach the top. The other arrived twenty minutes ago by tram. They are standing in the same place, enjoying the same view.

Has the tram passenger diminished the climber's achievement? Of course not. The climber didn't undertake the journey merely to stand on top of a rock; the climb itself was the point. The planning, the effort, the danger, the satisfaction of overcoming obstacles... these were experiences worth pursuing.

But now imagine the climber insisting that the tram service be prohibited because it cheapens the accomplishment of summiting the mountain. Now we have a different conversation.

What Makes Something Valuable?

We frequently confuse the difficulty of producing something with the value of what has been produced. Consider a beautifully handcrafted hardwood chair. Its maker may have spent weeks selecting materials, shaping components, perfecting joinery, and applying a flawless finish, all on top of years spent honing the skills required to do these things. The completed chair is a demonstration of patience, knowledge, and exceptional craftsmanship.

Now imagine you come along looking to buy some chairs for a children's pool party. You recognize the quality of the handcrafted chair, but for your purposes a fifteen-dollar plastic chair is lighter, easier to clean, simpler to store, safer around water, and far easier to replace when someone inevitably horses around and breaks it. Which chair is more valuable? The answer depends entirely on who's asking and what they intend to do with it.

The hardwood chair may be an extraordinary achievement of craftsmanship. That doesn't make it the better solution to every problem. Nor does the customer's preference for a plastic chair diminish the woodworker's skill or the satisfaction of making something beautiful.

The word "valuable" deserves unpacking, because there are at least two legitimate kinds of value here: the value of the experience to the creator and the value of the result to the person using it. The trouble begins when we as creators expect every potential customer to value our experience as highly as we do.

The Scarcity Premium

For much of human history, difficulty and scarcity have been reasonable proxies for value. If only a handful of people could perform a task, their services commanded a premium. If a material was hard to obtain, objects made from it became expensive. If mastering a craft required decades of study, those who possessed it enjoyed considerable professional standing, and that prestige was valuable. None of this is mysterious. Scarcity influences price. But price, scarcity, and value are not interchangeable.

Consider a limited-edition fashion accessory that commands an extraordinary premium because only a few hundred were made. Its owner may enjoy its beauty, durability, or utility, but some portion of its appeal comes from knowing that most other people cannot have one. Now suppose convincing copies, equal in looks, materials, and craftsmanship, become available on every street corner. The original remains every bit as beautiful and useful as it was before, but its exclusivity has evaporated; no casual observer can distinguish the mass-produced copy from the rare original. If that destroys the owner's enjoyment, we might reasonably wonder what they valued in the first place.

The same question applies to professional expertise.

When the Moat Disappears

Recent developments in how software is created offer a particularly interesting example of what happens when difficulty and scarcity are suddenly alleviated. For decades, programmers have invested enormous effort in learning languages, mastering frameworks, understanding complex systems, and cultivating the ability to solve hard technical problems.

Many programmers enjoy that work immensely. There is real pleasure in discovering an elegant solution, untangling a difficult problem, or creating something that didn't exist before. There has also been considerable economic value in being among the relatively few people capable of doing these things, and doing them right.

Then artificial intelligence began making substantial portions of that work accessible to people without the same training or experience. The response has been complicated, and for good reason. There are legitimate concerns about intellectual property, employment, reliability, concentrated ownership, and the long-term consequences of delegating creative and technical work to machines. These deserve serious consideration. But another response is increasingly visible: the insistence that work produced with AI assistance is inherently less legitimate because the person responsible didn't endure the traditional process of creating it. That, I believe, deserves scrutiny.

A programmer who enjoys writing every line of code by hand may, of course, continue doing so, just as the climber can keep climbing after the tram opens. But the existence of that choice doesn't obligate a customer to pay for their experience or their enjoyment. If two solutions accomplish the same purpose with comparable reliability, maintainability, and performance, why should the customer prefer the one that required more human effort? And if the handcrafted solution is demonstrably better, its superiority should be apparent in the result. Its value doesn't need to rest on the difficulty of its creation.

That insistence is particularly ironic coming from an industry that has spent decades celebrating automation, efficiency, abstraction, and disruption. We built computing machines to eliminate repetitive work, invented higher-level languages to avoid writing assembly, and developed frameworks to automate things that once required considerable expertise. All along the way we celebrated tools that allowed individuals to accomplish what once required entire teams. Yet when the same process begins to automate abilities we find pleasurable, or regard as exceptional in ourselves, the enthusiasm evaporates. It's one thing to mourn the disappearance of your moat. It's another to insist that the bridge builders, or the people crossing the bridge, are the problem.

The Joy of Doing Things the Hard Way

A purely economic argument discounts the value of the creative experience to zero. But it remains true that we humans find doing difficult things deeply rewarding, and that difficulty can inspire us to reach for better solutions. Some forms of human fulfillment seem to depend on encountering resistance and overcoming it. The challenge isn't simply an obstacle between us and the reward. Sometimes the challenge is the reward. When technology eliminates the necessity of struggle, it may also disrupt the sense of purpose people have built around that struggle, and I believe we should have some empathy for that loss.

But I want to be clear, and to underscore the point of this post: there is an essential distinction between preserving opportunities to undertake difficult things and denigrating, excluding, or attempting to socially or economically punish those who choose not to experience the same difficulty.

We don't prohibit trams to preserve mountaineering. We don't require pool-furniture buyers to commission a cabinetmaker to keep woodworking alive. We don't insist that photographers develop film in darkrooms to protect the legitimacy of photography. People remain free to pursue these activities because they find them meaningful, but the freedom to climb the mountain does not include the right to dismantle the tram or to demean its driver and passengers.

The Salieri Problem

The film Amadeus offers a fascinating depiction of what happens when accomplishment becomes inseparable from personal significance.

Salieri has dedicated his life to music. He has studied, practiced, cultivated relationships, and achieved professional standing. Then Mozart appears, seemingly capable of producing extraordinary beauty with an ease Salieri cannot comprehend. Salieri recognizes Mozart's genius more clearly than almost anyone around him. He can hear what he regards as the voice of God in Mozart's compositions, and it devastates him.

His tragedy isn't simply that another composer is more talented. It's that Mozart's existence undermines the meaning Salieri has assigned to his own life. He cannot separate his love of music from his need to occupy a particular place in its hierarchy. Eventually, admiration becomes resentment, and resentment becomes a desire to destroy the thing he admires.

It's a dramatization, of course, but the underlying conflict is recognizable. What happens when something you've spent your life mastering can suddenly be accomplished by someone, or something, without the same sacrifice? What happens when your experience remains real, your knowledge remains intact, and your accomplishments remain unchanged, but the scarcity that gave them economic and social distinction disappears?

Perhaps the most uncomfortable possibility is that we sometimes mistake our exclusivity for our expertise, or our expertise for our identity. And when that happens, technological progress can feel less like liberation than humiliation.

Significance Comes from Within

It doesn't have to. A world in which difficult things become easier should give us more freedom to pursue difficult, beautiful, challenging, and even economically pointless activities, not fewer opportunities to do so. The woodworker can make the chair. The climber can ascend the mountain. The programmer can write the code. They can do these things because they want to, not because the world needs them to, and perhaps that's a more expansive conception of prosperity than we've traditionally imagined: not merely a world in which everyone has access to what they need, but one in which people are free to find purpose without requiring their abilities to remain scarce, their achievements to outrank someone else's, or their preferred struggles to become everyone else's obligations.

The ultimate luxury of a prosperous society may be the freedom to do something difficult or unnecessary without needing anyone else to compensate or elevate us for the extra effort.