There is a pattern that recurs across history by which abundance destroys the value of what it produces. When a thing becomes available to everyone, the elite — defined broadly for this piece — quietly abandons it and migrates toward whatever remains difficult or scarce. Food is the obvious example: as more foods become available, you signal elite status by eating produce that is of higher quality and greater scarcity than the rest. Another could be Silicon Valley executives restricting their children's access to smartphones. They understand better than most what sustained exposure to frictionless information and slop does to a developing mind. Yet another, on a smaller scale, could be the resurgence of people buying vinyl records in an era of on-demand Spotify music.
Could intelligence be next?
We are in the early stages of a civilisational experiment in cognitive outsourcing. LLMs trained on most of the recorded thought of our species can now produce, on demand, serviceable analysis, competent prose, and functional code. It will probably continue to improve. The speed is intoxicating and the quality — for most everyday tasks — is genuinely impressive. Hundreds of millions of people are now subcontracting portions of their thinking to these systems, and the results at the surface level look like a vast democratisation of capability. In addition, reading levels are falling in Western countries at most levels.
But there may be a cost. I believe there is a meaningful distinction between accessing an answer and building the mental architecture that allows you to know which questions matter — a point I've written about before. The former is now almost trivially easy. The latter requires something quite different: sustained effort, the tolerance of confusion and complexity, the willingness to sit with a problem long enough that it begins to yield its own internal logic, and to pull from other sources. You cannot develop genuine analytical capacity by reading summaries, any more than you can develop physical strength by watching someone else lift weights, or learn to use the clutch by watching YouTube videos (trust me, I tried). In short, we are creating an abundance of intelligent answers that go beyond simple Google searches of the early-2000s era, while moving away from the hard part of thinking.
We will, I think, see this happen with intelligence within a generation. Being able to produce fluent, well-structured analysis will soon carry approximately as much status as being able to use Google Maps. What will command genuine premium — in intellectual circles, in political discourse, and perhaps in areas of professional life — will be the demonstrable capacity to think without the crutch. One historical parallel would be President Theodore Roosevelt preaching the strenuous life to a Harvard-educated elite at the precise moment industrial capitalism was making physical hardship economically unnecessary. There is a desire among some in this class for something different and special. Call it artisan intelligence.
This will probably be commercialised and worn as an elite marker. The template already exists in miniature: Waldorf schools, which ban screens, have expanded in Silicon Valley. Scale that in a different direction and you could get a company built around Socratic instruction — with teachers who do not use AI, working with students of any age to cultivate the discipline of forming ideas from first principles and building that mental architecture. It will be expensive, curated, and probably carry the faint atmosphere of a secular religion.