A familiar evolutionary story is repeating and we are yet to realize that we are in middle of it..
The Familiar one: For most of human history, calories were scarce…
So our bodies learned to crave sugar, store fat, and overeat whenever possible. Brilliant survival instincts.
Then calories became abundant. And those same instincts started killing us.
The problem wasn’t access to better food. It was that our biology was still running scarcity software in an abundance world.
We all know this, what we dont realize is that the same thing is happening right now with intelligence. And most professionals don’t see it yet.
The cost of AI intelligence is dropping 10x every year. Most people hear that and think “cool, AI is getting cheaper.” That misses the point entirely. This isn’t a pricing story.
It’s an abundance shift.
For our entire professional lives, intelligence has been expensive: Deep research meant consultants. Quality code meant expensive engineers. Good creative meant agencies with six-figure retainers.
So we learned to ration intelligence.
Skip the research before a sales call. Go with gut feel because analysis takes weeks. Send generic follow-ups because personalization “doesn’t scale.”
Those were rational adaptations to scarcity. But that world is gone.
I felt this personally with throwaway code.
I spent my career treating every line of code as precious. Then LLMs let me write a script, use it for an hour, and discard it. No architecture. No documentation. Just intelligence applied to a problem, then thrown away.
The first few times, it felt wasteful. That’s the scarcity instinct. The same one that says “finish your plate” when food is everywhere.
Once I overrode it, everything changed.
– A salesperson who stops rationing intelligence has a full dossier on every prospect and personalized follow-ups drafting themselves after every call.
– An engineer stops debugging himself and starts making architectural decisions that actually need human judgment.
– A marketer generates fifteen campaign variations before Monday standup instead of agonizing over one.
– A CEO walks into board meetings with scenario analyses that used to require a consulting engagement.
None of them are 10% better. They’re playing a different game.
These tools exist today for $200/month. A single McKinsey slide costs more than a year of that.
The gap between professionals who thrive and those who struggle in the AI age won’t be about access to intelligence.
it will be about who reprogrammed their instincts first.