Intelligence is a commodity now. The only thing left of value is the human capacity to verify it.

On Bankless, MIT economist Christian Catalini argued that AI has collapsed the cost of production across domains like coding, marketing, and strategy to near zero. This inverts the traditional economic model, making the entity that can guarantee quality - the human verifier - the ultimate scarce resource.

The crisis is a structural one for talent development. Entry-level roles, where novices learn tacit knowledge through grunt work, are being erased by AI that performs that work better. Without this ‘missing junior loop,’ companies will fail to cultivate the senior experts they need to act as those final verifiers.

Christian Catalini, Bankless:

- If you're entry level, if you haven't really acquired that tacit knowledge about what makes for a great product versus just average product, AI is out of the box often a good substitute for you.

- Everybody now has access to a pretty good marketer or pretty good engineering lead.

Senior professionals are inadvertently accelerating their own obsolescence. Catalini noted that AI labs hire top experts in law and finance to create evaluation datasets, effectively digitizing their intuition. By defining ‘good’ output, they train the systems that will eventually automate their high-level judgment.

The common defense - that human taste and judgment are irreplicable - is a fallacy. To an economist, taste is just a collection of measurable weights. Any preference that leaves a digital trail can be modeled. The only durable expertise lies in navigating novel edge-cases not yet in the training data.

The future economy will be defined by verification, not generation. As AI agents handle complex workflows, the human role contracts to that of the final gatekeeper. The winners will be those who can set and enforce the highest standards for what gets shipped.