Scarcity has been the driving force for almost the entirety of human existence. Our physiology and psychology evolved in environments lacking food, energy, labor, etc.

The study of economics itself wrestles with the question of allocating resources amongst competing needs and unlimited wants.

As we advanced technologically from stone tools to the information age and now AI, two competing views of scarcity have dominated human psyche. Most of us fall into one of two camps. You either have a Malthusian view of the world or a Cornucopian one.

The Malthusian view says we eventually hit the wall.

Named after Thomas Malthus, the basic argument is that population and consumption can grow faster than our ability to produce the resources necessary to support them. Therefore, scarcity will eventually win and civilization will erode, crumble, or end catastrophically.

Cornucopians believe human ingenuity continually overcomes the limits posed by Malthusians.

We achieve this by discovering new resources or invent substitutes through better technology and productivity.

The time tested mechanism is that as a resource becomes scarce, the price rises, people have an incentive to solve the problem, and eventually someone does.

I am firmly in the Cornucopian camp and, as of now, we’ve been correct. Human ingenuity has been the unlimited resource that has overcome scarcity in all its forms.

And AI may turn out to be the greatest Cornucopian technology ever invented.

If that’s true, will we witness the end of scarcity? If so, what does that mean for the products and services your business provides?

I don’t think it will end scarcity. Remember economics considers scarce resources in the context of unlimited wants, not just needs. Even if robot powered AI solves all the world’s basic needs, we won’t stop wanting.

Where does scarcity migrate in an abundant world and what could it mean for your business?

Most of the productivity gains from the internet and digital revolutions didn’t necessarily give us our time back.

In many cases, they created a version of Jevons Paradox.

Email made communication faster and easier, so we communicated more. Smartphones made us more accessible, so we became accessible all the time. Likes, comments, connection requests, Slack messages, and work emails at 8 p.m. filled the space that technology supposedly freed up.

The opportunity with AI may be different.

The real breakthrough may not be making things more productive, but eliminating them entirely.

Not helping you process twice as much email, but making most of the email disappear.

Not making meetings more efficient, but making the meeting unnecessary.

Not helping you compare fifty options faster, but deciding which three are worth your attention in the first place.

That is how AI could genuinely give people time back without immediately creating demand for more of the same activity.

Much of the internet and mobile economy was built around capturing share of eyeballs.

The AI economy may instead revolve around capturing share of agents.

Personalized agents will increasingly act as proxies for us. Imagine your agent screening information, making decisions, negotiating, purchasing, and deciding what is worth interrupting us for.

That could lead to radically different business models.

Instead of advertisers paying a platform for access to your attention, their agent may have to negotiate directly with yours. Perhaps even having to pay for the privilege.

Think of it as a kind of pay-to-interrupt economy, where your agent treats your time like a scarce asset and decides what is valuable enough to reach you.

I’ve written previously on how your service must be accessible to agents or it will go the way of the phone book. I believe one of the driving forces will be the desire for everyone to not only gain access via their agents, but have their agents gate access to them.

“Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.”

That was the famous line from Cheers, the 1980s sitcom about a basement bar in Boston filled with eccentric regulars and memorable staff.

That kind of familiarity may become a competitive advantage in more businesses.

As AI spreads, interactions will increasingly fall into three buckets: agent-to-agent, human-to-agent, and human-to-human.

The scarce and often premium interaction will increasingly be human-to-human.

Medicine is a good example.

Medical schools have traditionally selected heavily for intellect, knowledge, and diagnostic ability. But as AI becomes better at diagnosis, the scarce skill may shift.

The best physicians may be those who combine powerful AI tools with exceptional bedside manner: empathy, trust, judgment, and the ability to guide a patient through uncertainty.

AI won’t eliminate doctors.

It may simply move the scarcity from knowing the answer to knowing how to better care emotionally for the patient.

Speaking of medicine, much of healthcare has historically been built around population averages. Even the “normal” ranges on your blood work are based on what is typical across large groups.

Those averages won’t disappear, but AI will push healthcare toward much greater personalization.

By combining data from wearables, medical records, genetics, sleep, diet, activity, and other individual inputs, AI could make recommendations based less on the average person and more on you.

That creates opportunities for businesses to offer far more targeted products and services.

A supplement company, for example, might move from selling the same protein powder to everyone to recommending specific formulations and doses based on how different people actually metabolize them.

As health information becomes more abundant, personal relevance becomes scarce. Wellness and health will shift from mass-market to hyper-individualized.

You’ve probably heard the controversy surrounding Flock cameras. These license-plate readers are now common in many towns and cities and have drawn scrutiny over how law enforcement can access the data they collect.

As cameras proliferate and AI becomes better at monitoring, identifying, and analyzing us, privacy will become increasingly valuable.

The scarcity will be places where information is not collected, retained, analyzed, or monetized.

That could mean AI assistants that keep data on-device, healthcare providers that minimize data retention, social networks without behavioral tracking, or financial services that let customers control exactly what an AI can access and for how long.

It could even extend to physical spaces. You can imagine hotels, clubs, and retreats where cameras, phones, and recording devices are restricted.

We may eventually pay for digital invisibility the way we now pay for cybersecurity.

As AI gives everyone abundant personalized entertainment, companionship, education, and health advice, the scarcity becomes belonging to something exclusive.

This will open the door for businesses to make community a core part of their marketing and sales strategy. Or the community itself may become the product.

Where you belong will become a stronger signal of identity, taste, status, and values.

The most valuable communities may not be ones you can simply buy your way into. Membership might be earned through accomplishment, contribution, or time.

A founder network, for example, might only admit people who have built a company past a certain stage. Such networks exist today but their prevalence will likely increase.

The barrier itself becomes part of the value.

The more everything else becomes personalized and universally available, the more valuable it may feel to be part of something that is not.

In an age of abundance, access itself may become scarce.

If AI ushers in an age of abundance, the opportunity won’t come from assuming scarcity disappears but predicting where it moves.

For your business, ask a simple question:

If what I sell becomes cheaper, faster, easier, or more abundant, what becomes more valuable instead?

Is it your customer’s time? Their ability to connect with a human? Do they want tailored solutions, advice or access to a private community they can’t buy their way into?

The more extreme the abundance, the more valuable the scarcity.

Stop worrying about what AI will replace.

The opportunity is to identify how scarcity will migrate and offer products and services that satisfy it.

My goal with The Leap is to provide you each Saturday with the knowledge, tools and lessons learned to help you get started and keep going toward building your future. 

Whether you are making the leap to startups, solo-entrepreneurship, freelancing, side hustles or other creative ventures, the tools and strategies to succeed in each are similar.