The Future of Professions and Society
When the cost of intelligence falls to zero
For decades, access to intelligence—much like access to computers in the past—was a privilege. It was concentrated in the hands of specialised professionals: lawyers, doctors, consultants, analysts, and creatives. Society built its systems of value, status, and compensation around those who possessed more knowledge, thought more critically, or solved problems with precision.
But something profound is unfolding.
With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, we are witnessing a historic shift:
The marginal cost of intelligence is collapsing.
What once required years of study, support teams, or significant investment can now be done in seconds, with a single prompt. Generating reports, translating ideas, creating content, writing code, drafting contracts, diagnosing, brainstorming—it’s all becoming abundant, accessible, and nearly free.
Where scarcity was once cognitive, it is now computation that is abundant.
What does this mean for knowledge professions?
Just as the Industrial Revolution devalued manual craftsmanship and the Digital Revolution disintermediated access to information, the Intelligence Revolution is redrawing the value of thinking.
Professions built on exclusive access to technical knowledge are now being challenged:
The copywriter has been replaced by creative AI.
The lawyer, by auto-generated contracts.
The analyst uses conversational dashboards.
The consultant, by strategic copilots.
This is not about the “threat” to professions, but about the commoditisation of expertise.
Intelligence has become infrastructure. And like all infrastructure, it tends to disappear beneath our feet—quietly—until we realise the world has changed.
Simple tasks are already FREE.
Tasks once considered “entry-level” are now performed at no cost:
Summarising text
Creating social media posts
Translating emails
Performing basic analysis
Designing presentations
Building simple websites
These were stepping stones into the job market. Now they are automated services.
This leads to a difficult question: If execution is now a commodity, what remains of value?
What AI still can’t do (Well)
Despite its growing power, AI still struggles in domains that require:
Embodiment: sensory experience, physical intuition, presence.
Emotion: genuine empathy, emotional co-regulation, deep listening.
Ethics: moral ambiguity, values-based decision-making.
True creativity: cultural rupture, innovation from within.
Relationships: trust-building, lived stories, emotional bonding.
Purpose: a sense of meaning, intentionality, and vision.
When everything can be done with artificial efficiency, what remains is what is deeply human.
Long-Term societal impacts
We are facing a civilisational shift.
If intelligence and execution become abundant, value will move toward:
Orchestration of intelligences – knowing how to combine humans + machines + purpose.
Applied wisdom – the ability to discern what truly matters.
Strategic imagination – designing futures that are not only possible, but desirable.
Human presence – relationships, trust, care.
Collective intelligence – mobilising groups toward meaningful action.
In the coming years, professions will be redesigned, new classes will emerge (such as curators, sensemakers, and facilitators of chaos), and education will need to shift from content delivery to wisdom cultivation.
A call for responsibility
It’s not enough to “use AI.”
The question we must ask is:
What will we do with this new abundance?
And more importantly: Who gets left behind if we don’t redesign the system together?
We are standing at the edge of a new era.
An era in which intelligence will be free, but discernment will be priceless.
Creativity will be scalable, but purpose will be rare.
Technology will shine, but our humanity will make us irreplaceable.