What Will Be Scarce in the Age of AI

One of the clearest and most level-headed pieces written recently about AI’s impact on the labor market comes from economist Alex Imas in his Substack essay “What Will Be Scarce?”. The core idea is refreshingly simple and brutally important: economics has never been about jobs or employment. It has always been about scarcity — the bottleneck where real demand and real money concentrate.

Wherever something is genuinely scarce, that’s where value and wealth flow. Everything else is just noise.

Scarcity Is the Only Constant

What Will Be Scarce in the Age of AI For thousands of years the binding constraint was food. Most of humanity worked the land or hunted. A few centuries ago the bottleneck moved to manufactured goods — machines, homes, appliances, consumer products. Industrialization and mass production solved that scarcity for the rich world.

Now AI and robotics are doing to physical and digital production what the tractor did to farming. The share of the global economy once dominated by agriculture has collapsed from over 50% to roughly 1.5%. The same structural shift is coming for anything that can be automated: manufacturing, routine services, even large parts of knowledge work and creative output.

The pie isn’t fixed. As automation drives prices toward zero, real incomes rise across the board. People don’t just buy more of the same cheap stuff — they change what they want. They move up the hierarchy of needs and desires. And what they increasingly crave are things that cannot be perfectly replicated by machines.

The New Scarcity: Human Connection and Uniqueness

The things that will remain scarce are deeply human:

Genuine attention and presence;
Real relationships and trust;
Uniqueness and provenance (“this was made by this person”);
Co-creation and participation;
Status, exclusivity, and shared experiences.

Sports, travel, live arts, premium education, therapy, hospitality, bespoke craftsmanship, intimate communities — these are the categories that become relatively more valuable as everything else gets commoditized. People are willing to pay a premium precisely because a robot or an AI can’t deliver the irreplaceable human element.

As Imas points out, this is not speculation — it’s how economies have always evolved. When one sector becomes super-productive, labor and spending simply reallocate to the next binding constraint. The “relational sector” — human-intensive, experience-driven activities — is the next frontier.

Today’s Highest-Leverage Skill

What Will Be Scarce in the Age of AI Right now, in 2025–2026, the single most valuable thing you can do economically is become the person who automates entire industries. The operators, builders, and strategists who can take AI and robotics and apply them at scale across corporations and sectors are capturing enormous value. They are solving the current bottleneck: turning abundant intelligence into real productivity gains.

That window is wide open and will remain highly rewarded for years.

Recent analyses of the emerging 2026 hybrid freelance economy make this even sharper. AI agents are already handling up to 80% of routine tasks in coding, content generation, and data auditing — cutting time spent on these activities by 65%. The highest-leverage players are no longer doing the work themselves; they operate the full “AI stack.” New roles such as AI-Workflow Architect, Prompt Auditor, and Smart Contract Security Specialist are surging in demand, while the pure market value of irreplaceable human creativity has risen 2.5×. This is the present-day gold rush: mastering automation at industrial scale before the next layer of scarcity fully materializes.

Tomorrow’s Winning Skill

But the horizon is already visible.

In the coming decade or two, the highest returns will shift to those who can create, curate, and deliver the things that stay scarce:

Deep personal relationships and trust;
Unique, non-replicable experiences;
Authentic participation and co-creation;
Human judgment wrapped in warmth and presence.

The winners won’t be the ones who compete on cost or speed (machines will always win there). They will be the ones who master the economics of the human layer — the part that cannot be automated away.

The Bottom Line

AI is not going to make economics irrelevant. It is simply relocating the bottleneck.

What Will Be Scarce in the Age of AI

The economy was never a fixed pie to be divided. As abundance arrives in one domain, human preferences and mimetic desires push demand into new, still-scarce territory. The people who understand this transition early — who can ride the automation wave today and build the relational, experiential economy tomorrow — will capture the majority of the gains.

Scarcity never disappears. It just changes form.

Figure out where the next bottleneck is forming.
Position yourself there.
Everything else is just commentary.