A Human Advantage in the AI Economy

A review of how humans can create economic value in the age of artificial intelligence.

People sweating at concert, silhouettes, dj, bright volumetric lights, f1.8, sigma, DSLR photo, crowd, multicolored lights –ar 3:2.

This article is an attempt to collect the thoughts and notes I have gathered over the last six months, detailing the limitations of artificial intelligence, and where humans still have a shot at providing economic value. The basis of this article is that we keep our current economic model in society, and that value creation will still be a desired result in the future.

With the release of cheap, and even free, consumer friendly artificially intelligent technology, knowledge workers the world over are suddenly faced with a harsh truth: the comparative advantage that has been built up over an entire career is diminishing, eroding, and disappearing as we speak.

Ever since the release of Stable Diffusion 1.3 I have been intrigued and, truth be told, a bit annoyed, at how the skills that I have built up as a designer are rapidly becoming antiquated. I am thankful that I didn’t spend my life trying to become an illustrator or a 3D interior rendering pro as I initially thought I wanted to do. But really, it is a matter of time before all types of knowledge work will be entirely done or at least heavily augmented by AI.

According to Moore’s law, which is still relevant, computers have steadily increased their processing power exponentially since 1965 and humans have remained largely stagnant, it does not take many cycles for AI to take off like a rocketship.

A semi-log plot of transistor counts for microprocessors against dates of introduction, nearly doubling every two years.

The contamination of channels and human gatekeepers

As more of the content we consume is generated by AI we will see a contamination of our collective content.

This will result in an even bigger sea of generic, unhelpful, non-specific content to sift through. Human gatekeepers working with AI will initially become even more important as we seek to uncover the golden nuggets in the ever growing pile of auto generated content.

There will naturally be market forces working to make curation and distillation automated as well and I imagine highly specific models trained on your personal second brain libraries will be able to combat this quite a bit.

In fact, finely tuned large models have been touted by Sam Altman, one of the founders of OpenAI, as a creator of massive economic opportunity.

“I think there’ll be a lot of access provided to create the model for medicine or using a computer or a friend or whatever. And then those companies will create a lot of enduring value because they will have a special version of it. They won’t have to have created the base model, but they will have created something they can use just for themselves or share with others.”

— Sam Altman

There are already hundreds of services and products that would be immensely beneficial to people, that go unused. Because we live in a world with so much noise and so little time to discover and trial new solutions, these services and products are not being sold, even to their respective ideal markets.

In a world (trailer voiceover) where we can program a new app, create a 4K Hollywood movie and ship a new book with the click of a button this noise will be even more prevalent.

Images created by Arcane Diffusion, a fine-tuned Stable Diffusion model trained on images from the Netflix TV show Arcane.

The 10× producer

Perhaps the most obvious and straightforward path to creating economic value as a human is to embrace the technology and use it to become n× more productive.

During the first many years, maybe even decades, of the AI revolution, it will be relevant to use AI to augment your current processes—skip entire steps—as you utilize an augmented process for creating value.

In this temporary and intermediary step, there will be massive value created through courses that teach you how to keep up with the changing technology and use it in your day to day. Like a masterclass.com around using AI to augment yourself at work.

This advantage will eventually erode as the AI does everything, including the administering and deployment of artificially intelligent processes, better and faster than humans.

The speed at which you can use an AI to automate parts of your job will be a temporary advantage, but it will disappear over time.

Human agencies vs AI agencies

The lines between human-created and AI-created companies will blur. For a time, the differentiator will be a human touch: a way to relate, to build trust, to ensure that the thing a client asked for is the thing they actually need.

But the economics are sobering. Fully automated companies can launch, scale, and iterate without human bottlenecks. The “AI agency” that builds and ships products in hours will eventually outpace human teams unless those teams figure out where they add irreplaceable value.

Human curators and editors

One answer is curation. AI can generate more than we can consume. Human editors who build taste, context, and voice can stand out. Think of it as the ultimate concierge service: letting an audience know what to pay attention to and why.

The upside is that a sharp curator can start today—use AI to explore, then surface the best of it with human commentary, nuance, and judgment. The downside is that the tooling will improve here too. Expect competition from people who are faster and from AI models that will get surprisingly good at contextualization. Again, it’s a temporary advantage.

Distribution and trust

Another path is becoming the human that an audience trusts. When distribution is fragmented, the person who can consistently show up, give context, and guide others through the noise becomes extremely valuable. That trust can’t be faked by a model—at least not yet.

If you have a reputation for strong taste, focus, execution, or commentary on a niche, you can leverage AI to scale that reach. But the foundation must be a human relationship with other humans.

Being the “last mile” for outcomes

Long term, the question becomes: what is the “last mile” task a human still needs to do? Think of coaching, facilitation, negotiation, bespoke storytelling, or any task that requires deep empathy and contextual understanding.

Even if AI can do 95% of the work, someone has to take responsibility for the final 5%—the part where real-world messiness happens. The human advantage is being accountable for the outcome, not just the output.

Final thoughts

More work will get automated. More creative energy will be augmented. But people who can:

• Diagnose what actually matters.
• Build trust and relationships.
• Take ownership of outcomes when it counts.

…will still be valuable. That’s the job: stay curious, keep learning, and keep searching for the work that feels like a true human advantage.

If you have thoughts or disagreements, email me at hi@martinm.co or find me on X.