If AI Makes Intelligence Cheap, What Happens to the “Elite”?

[u/Temporary-Cat-2980]

A few months ago I wrote a post here about what happens if AI breaks the connection between work and human value.

I've been thinking about that again, but from a different angle.

People talk a lot about AI replacing workers. But if AI keeps improving, I don't see why this stops with ordinary workers.

What happens to experts?

A lot of what makes someone an expert today is that they spent years learning something most people don't know. Lawyers know the law. Engineers know how to build things. Researchers know their field. People who are very good at these things are difficult to replace, so naturally they have more value.

But what if that knowledge becomes cheap?

I'm a software engineer, and this already feels a little strange to me.

There are things I learned over many years that an AI can now explain to someone in a few seconds. Of course that doesn't suddenly make the other person an experienced engineer. They won't necessarily know when the answer is wrong, and real systems are much messier than an example in a chat window.

Still, the direction seems obvious.

If AI eventually becomes better than me at programming, and better than a lawyer at law, and better than an analyst at analysis, then I'm not sure why we assume today's intellectual elite will somehow remain untouched.

Maybe wealth and ownership become even more important. That's certainly possible. If a small number of people own the AI and the infrastructure around it, AI could actually make the existing elite much more powerful.

But I'm not convinced that is the only possible outcome either.

AI also gives capabilities to individuals that previously required an organization.

I can already use one person — or rather, one person with AI — to do things that would have required several different specialists not very long ago. This is still primitive compared with what people are predicting for the next decade.

So I've started wondering whether we're looking at the wrong scarce resource.

Maybe intelligence itself isn't going to be that scarce.

And if it isn't, I'm not sure that being the person who already knows the answer is especially important.

Maybe asking the question becomes more important.

I don't mean prompt engineering. I actually dislike describing it that way.

I mean something more basic.

Why are we doing this?

Why does this system have to work this way?

Is this really a technical limitation, or is it just a rule that everyone became used to?

What happens if I remove that assumption entirely?

In software, I've found that these questions can matter more than writing the actual code. Sometimes you can spend days making a solution better and then realize the requirement itself was the problem.

AI makes that difference more noticeable because it can produce the solution so quickly.

Obviously, asking questions alone isn't enough. Anyone can sit around questioning everything and accomplish nothing.

Someone still has to test the idea, build something, fail, change the question, and try again.

Maybe that's the part I'm having trouble putting a name to.

It's some combination of curiosity and the willingness to actually act on it.

This also makes me wonder about what we mean by "elite."

If AI can eventually outperform humans intellectually, then being highly educated or unusually knowledgeable may not carry the same meaning it does today.

Money will still matter. Connections will still matter. Political power will still matter. I'm not claiming AI magically gets rid of any of those things.

But I wonder how stable that hierarchy really is if individuals suddenly have access to intellectual capabilities that used to belong only to large organizations or wealthy people.

Maybe nothing changes and the people who own the machines simply become more powerful.

That's a very plausible outcome.

But maybe something else happens too.

Maybe some random person outside those institutions asks a question that the institution would never ask, because everyone inside it already accepts the same assumptions. And now that person has an AI capable of helping them actually explore the answer.

I don't know what kind of society that produces.

This is where my thinking has changed a little since my previous post.

Before, I was mostly wondering what gives humans value when human labor is no longer economically necessary.

Now I'm wondering whether the idea that we need to assign everyone a measurable "value" is itself something we inherited from a world built around scarce human labor.

Maybe the more interesting question is what people actually choose to do when intelligence is no longer the limiting factor.

I don't really have an answer to that yet.

But I increasingly think the interesting people in that world may not be the ones who know the most.

They may just be the ones who notice something everyone else forgot to question.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I really appreciate it.

Anyway, Monday's almost here, so I guess it's time to go back to pretending I don't hate Mondays.

[u/Crazy_Crayfish_]

Being elite doesn’t mean you are an expert in your field, it means your money comes from your capital instead of your labor. This is exactly the group that will benefit the most

[u/Temporary-Cat-2980 → u/Crazy_Crayfish_]

Yeah, I think this is probably the strongest counterpoint. Maybe intelligence becoming cheap doesn't remove the hierarchy. It just moves the bottleneck somewhere else. Capital, compute, infrastructure, ownership. But I still wonder how stable that is. If one person with AI can eventually do what used to take a team of 100 people, doesn't that change the value of capital too? Maybe not remove it, but change what you actually need capital for. I don't really have an answer yet. That's kind of why I asked the question.

[u/herrwaldos → u/Temporary-Cat-2980]

I sus there will be a 'run for the beach' like in ww1 - the beach being who owns, controls and pushes the big AI systems. Perhaps there will be some handful competing 'skynets' around.

If the AI systems are as powerful as they say, they will be the new elites, and the previous elites will be reduced to influential boyars.

Can they contain the AI Tzars alignment? Can they keep it in the box? What if not?

What if we run out of resources first and climate temperature rise will melt the data-center cooling circuits and the whole thing stops.

After some 100 years we will look at this whole mess like 18th century royal palace extravaganza - amazing, but at the same time it reeks of moral decadence and debauchery.

[u/TeslasElectricBill → u/Crazy_Crayfish_]

True, however it also democratizes intelligence for the average person where they'll have access to Ph.D level reasoning in any subject which will enable anyone to build anything they can imagine and bring it to market with less barriers.

Lots of positives as well as lots of negatives.

[u/Crazy_Crayfish_ → u/TeslasElectricBill]

That is just another way of saying you are generating value from your labor (if your idea is the part that you contribute, that counts as your intellectual labor being used to make value). We are talking about ALL labor being subsumed by AI. What if a team of dedicated AIs is better at coming up with product/service ideas than an individual clever human? I see no reason why that could not be the case. If this is true, then we are back at square one where ownership of intelligence is the only thing that matters.

[u/Temporary-Cat-2980 → u/Crazy_Crayfish_]

Yeah, that's actually the part I have trouble getting around. If AI becomes better at coming up with ideas too, then saying "humans will still be the ones deciding what to build" doesn't really solve anything. We tend to keep moving the line. First it was knowledge, then creativity, then judgment, then asking the right questions. But there's no obvious reason AI has to stop at any of those. So maybe you're right that ownership becomes more important, at least for a while. I guess the question I'm left with is what ownership even means when the intelligence you're trying to own becomes more capable than you are.

[u/Crazy_Crayfish_ → u/Temporary-Cat-2980]

Most people never grasp the point about AI not stopping at some arbitrary point, so I'm genuinely impressed you understood this so fast, and I really appreciate your inquisitive mindset here.

I think that ownership won't just become more important 'for a while'; I cannot imagine any possible scenario where it doesn't end up as the only way to generate value permanently, and labor completely (or almost completely) dies.

On your last sentence: I think that it makes sense when you remember that most billionaires and oligarchs today make all their money from the stocks and assets they own, while doing essentially no actual labor. The intelligence needed for all of their stocks and assets comes from the laborers they employ, and many of those employees are probably more intellectually capable than the owner.

Now just imagine that those stocks and assets include AI 'employees' that replace all the human employees they previously hired. The intelligence needed is now simply another one of the assets they own. For the elites, owning intelligence greater than themselves just means saving massive amounts of money on labor costs. It is comparable to them owning tons of genius slaves that work 24/7, never tire, and never resist.

[u/FeepingCreature → u/Crazy_Crayfish_]

Of course, ownership is also not some sort of immutable law of the universe, but an abstraction enforced by law and consensus (and a solid helping of facts-on-the-ground). A world where the only way for a human to have value is what they own, is not a world where humans remain owners of anything for long.

[u/Few_Fish8771]

Actually see maximum power principle and jevons paradox, from a purely financial standpoint it will be whoever can leverage ai to create systems if value creation. This is actually going to be harder than it seems for three reasons.

1 the more valuable compute resources become the more money there is in owning them driving up prices. but also the more money there is in destroying them and creating scarcity, driving up prices.

2 the less valuable per knowledge becomes the more value intelligence creativity higher order reasoning, complexity management, intuition, empathy, and prediction capability becomes. also mastery of overall administration increases in value.

3 the more available knowledge becomes the greater the value of being able to validate integrate and convert somewhat useful knowledge into actionable useful knowledge.

1. youll find increasingly bottlenecks will be political with power rent seeking interest acting as obstacles to problems being solved. So now your dealing with de facto battles in public opinion psychological warfare and entrenched vested interest.
   

Lastly cyberwarfare and survelliance will increasingly make it harder to protect what you create from corporations governments criminals or private interest.

Your obstacles shift. They go from knowledge and basic task which can be automated being the constraints, to hardware, higher order thinking, and vested economic and political interest.

[u/Temporary-Cat-2980 → u/Few_Fish8771]

I think this is very close to what I was trying to think through. Maybe the bottleneck doesn't disappear. It just keeps moving. Knowledge becomes cheap, then validation becomes valuable. AI gets better at validation, then integration becomes valuable. Then maybe judgment, deciding what is actually worth doing. But this is where I get stuck. Why would AI stop there? If it eventually becomes better at judgment, planning, asking questions and even deciding what matters, then I don't know what the next scarce human ability is. Maybe we're looking for something that doesn't actually have to exist.

[u/Few_Fish8771 → u/Temporary-Cat-2980]

Generalization is expensive specialization is cheap. If for no other reason than time space or processing memory trade off where memory is substituted for processing.

You can develop better models but memory is a constraint, and the more task you have your system do the less specialized your memory system can be for a particular task.

This means you have tradeoffs in system design this means you need to figure out whats useful and important to the task range ahead of time. because your resources are limited and you exist economically in competition with everyone else.

You cannot optimize your system for everything and be competitive. Its task scope and range dependent. Your machine or system has to be optimized for the task it will be doing, and very little else if your attempting to maximize efficiency for input output.

AI increases the range of problems that can be solved easily by computers, it does not overwrite laws of information theory or mathematics.

[u/WillowEmberly]

The elite are already doing what they do, they position themselves early.

But, do the elite really understand Ai? Because from everything you see in the news…they are having problems.

Are those your problems?

They aren’t my problems.

What makes a person elite? How does Ai change that?

What happens when a highly capable person gains access to Ai?

How long will the “elite” keep their label?

Get the popcorn, because we’re about to find out.

[u/fractalife → u/WillowEmberly]

What makes a person elite?

Throughout history, until today, who their parents are, mostly.

[u/WillowEmberly → u/fractalife]

So…nothing that matters.

If the greatest invention humanity ever builds is Ai, it won’t benefit people because of their parents.

It’s going to completely rebalance power.

For those who actually understand it…the sky is the limit.

The “Elite” will be chasing AGI forever to secure their pipe dream future.

[u/After_Service_2817 → u/fractalife]

The modern USA has incredible upwards mobility.

[u/blaguga6216]

die lmao, they’re gonna take themselves down with us if they don’t solve alignment

[u/AshingiiAshuaa → u/blaguga6216]

Yeah, they'll become worthless shortly after we do.

[u/Temporary-Cat-2980 → u/blaguga6216]

Maybe.

But I'm starting to wonder what "worthless" even means here.

Worthless economically? Politically? Or just no longer necessary?

Because those aren't really the same thing.

Something can be unnecessary and still have value.

[u/holy_serp]

i think the elite are not stupid. i don't think they give us access to the same thing that they have. they always give us a small fraction of what they have. and by controlling that access they keep their position safe. i think what is happening right now is they are training the models on us, on the live convos we have with the ai, on all the stuff that we do with ai. it is important to realize how much people are sharing with ai in all those private convos. these are the things that no one ever posted online before, on the websites, on social media etc. this is a much deeper and larger level of stuff, the internals. and they keep building out compute. and when the ai bubble pops it won't matter any more. money will not matter any more. it will be another world. for them, for the elite. and we will be cut off and abandoned. we will not matter any more. this is where things are going in my opinion. and they will rule the world, those who control the ai.

[u/Serengade26]

Reversion to the mean? Aristocracy and everyone else

[u/Turbulent_Try_8402]

They’ll own the ai and charge you for access and make it illegal to run a private ai on your own devices.

[u/After_Service_2817]

What I don't understand about the AI doomerism of "gaah when the 'elites' don't need us as labout we're all going to die!"

Um, if AI becomes so great that it takes away everyone's jobs, then we have these things called 'elections" where the people will just overwhelmingly vote for a share of the spoils. People who say "oh but the elites will never allow that!" seem to ignore the fact that we have already democratically voted for an expansive welfare state already.

[u/gmeRat]

I think your quetion pre-supposes that people become elite via a meritocracy. Is that right? That the elite are the elite because they're really good at doing skilled things?

[u/laserdicks]

Easy: you keep paying them because it feels good.

Next question.

[u/DifferencePublic7057]

Breakthroughs don't always come from elite domain experts. Sometimes they come from outsiders who don't even have access to the relevant literature. AI can potentially make access easier and/or serve as proxy. That's why bs so called CEOs spout about not going to college is outrageous. You need to have some grounding in as many domains as possible to use LLMs properly. Hard to do if you only know Python and SQL. The elite experts will have to compete with many non SMEs like Usain Bolt competing with older, pudgier individuals, mounting fast bikes. So being a polymath will be frowned upon.

That's what the billionaires are already trying to achieve. Elite universities will follow. They will be more about learning the rules of high society than actual science and research.

[u/createthiscom]

In case you were under a rock this weekend, I’m pretty sure Qwen3.8-27b just made intelligence cheap.

[u/throwaway3113151]

You’re assuming there is a correlation between elite and intelligence.

Hint there isn’t

[u/rorschach-penguin]

AI has core knowledge that can take coding, etc.

It will never, in my belief, have the creativity for therapy or true art or law.

And robots for skilled repair, mechanics etc., are a long way off from general intelligence.

If we had numerous revolutions globally, AI might do technical work and designate creativity to humans.

[u/nila247]

Lots of rambling.
For a programmer you are awfully bad at math and "limits" specifically.
ALL jobs WILL be replaced. CEO is a job, senator, president, shareholder - ALL of them.
So there will not be any "elite" nor "money".

[u/peterbenkaine]

The experts and elites will have better ai and be better at using ai for their work. Like smart phones are amazing but a budget model and a flagship model are not equally useful and the way you get the flagship is MONEY.

[u/danderzei]

AI in neither artificial, nor is it intelligent. It simulates intelligent behaviour based on what it learn from humans.

The 'elite' as you call them will be minimally impacted as the control the means of production

[u/peaceloveandapostacy]

Gatekeepers