As AI Becomes Cheap Infrastructure, Scarcity Shifts to Goals, Trusted Facts and Real-World Execution

The article argues that LLM intelligence, once cheap and on-demand like tap water or electricity, will commoditize basic text-based work such as drafting, summarizing and simple coding. Scarcity will instead move to the interface between AI and the real world, including defining objectives and evaluation standards, supplying auditable and accountable factual data, and building agents that reliably execute tasks within existing business systems. It draws historical analogies to railways, electrical grids and fiber internet, where the abundant utility made standardized products, equipment, trust and attention the new scarce assets. The author concludes that digital agents will likely create value faster than embodied AI like robotics, which faces heavier physical, cost and liability constraints over a longer horizon.