The Things Technology Makes More Valuable

By: John F Groom

Why AI and Automation May Increase the Value of the Human, Physical and Real

A MyUniversa White Paper

Technological progress is usually described in terms of what technology makes possible. The automobile makes transportation easier. Industrial machinery makes manufactured goods cheaper. The Internet makes information abundant. Artificial intelligence makes many forms of cognitive production faster and less expensive. But every major technology also changes the value of things it does not produce.

When something becomes abundant, its former scarcity value declines. At the same time, qualities that the technology removes, obscures, substitutes for, or cannot authentically reproduce may become relatively scarce. Those qualities can consequently become more valuable. This produces what we might call the Technological Countervalue Principle: As technology makes one class of capability abundant, it can increase the scarcity value of qualities the technology removes, obscures, or cannot authentically reproduce.

Artificial intelligence could make this effect particularly powerful because AI does not merely replace physical effort. It can reproduce things we have historically treated as evidence of human thought and creativity: prose, illustrations, photographs, music, voices, software, analysis and eventually highly convincing video. The consequence may not be a world in which human activity becomes worthless. It may be a world in which certain kinds of demonstrably human activity become considerably more valuable.

What Becomes Scarce

The pattern can already be seen across many areas of life.

The common characteristic isn't nostalgia. We do not have to believe that life was better before computers or industrialization. The phenomenon is economic and psychological: abundance changes relative value.

A handmade chair was not particularly remarkable when virtually every chair required extensive human labor. In a world capable of manufacturing millions of nearly identical chairs at very low cost, a chair made by a known craftsperson using identifiable wood and traditional joinery becomes a fundamentally different good. The machine-made chair may perform its physical function better and cost one-tenth as much. That can actually make the handmade chair more interesting.

Country Music and the Return to Human Scale

The recent broadening appeal of country music may be partly understood in this context. The modern information environment is increasingly abstract. People encounter artificial intelligence, globalization, climate change, monetary policy, geopolitical conflict, algorithms, demographic change, immigration, biotechnology and political systems whose causal relationships can be extraordinarily difficult for any individual to understand.

Country music characteristically operates at the opposite scale. Someone loves someone, someone leaves, a father gets old, a mother dies, a young person wants to leave home and later misses it, someone drinks too much, someone screws up, someone works all week and wants Saturday night, and someone remembers a particular road, river, truck, town, porch or person. These are comprehensible stories.

Country music is also unusually attached to place. Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, Georgia and Carolina appear constantly. So do rivers, mountains, farms, county roads, bars, churches and small towns. The technological world is increasingly placeless. A Zoom meeting can happen anywhere. Amazon doesn't particularly care where the customer lives. AI is accessible from thousands of locations. Financial capital can move across the planet electronically. Country music keeps saying: this happened here.

It also disproportionately concerns the slow-moving parts of human existence. Artificial intelligence can change dramatically in a year. Falling in love hasn't changed nearly as much. Neither has losing someone, wanting your father to be proud of you, feeling attached to home, regretting a mistake or confronting mortality.

As the external world becomes more complicated, abstract and difficult to comprehend, we should expect greater cultural demand for experiences that remain comprehensible at human scale. Country music may be one manifestation of that demand because it tells a story about one life, and one life remains understandable even when the world isn't.

The Handmade Object

Industrialization made manufactured objects dramatically less expensive. Automation and robotics will continue that process. Artificial intelligence adds another dimension because it can increasingly participate in designing the object as well. That combination could make genuine craftsmanship more valuable rather than less.

Imagine two wooden tables. One is designed algorithmically, cut by computer-controlled machinery and manufactured by an automated production line. It is dimensionally perfect, strong, attractive and inexpensive. The second was made by one person. You know who that person is. You can see where the tree came from. You can watch the craftsperson select the boards, cut the joints, correct mistakes, shape the edges and apply the finish. Perhaps the table is signed and its construction documented.

The first table is primarily a product. The second contains a human story, and that story becomes part of its economic value. This means provenance may become increasingly important. It will no longer be sufficient to label something "handmade." If AI and automated manufacturing make imitation easy, buyers who care about craftsmanship will increasingly want evidence: Who made it? Where? When? How? What materials were used? Can I see the process?

The craftsmanship and the documentation of craftsmanship become complementary assets. The imperfection may even become desirable. A slight irregularity that once reduced manufacturing quality can become evidence that a human hand was actually involved. We already see something similar with paintings, furniture, pottery, watches, musical instruments and other objects for which buyers willingly pay enormous premiums despite cheaper alternatives performing the same utilitarian function. AI could extend that distinction into many more categories.

The Return of Skilled Manual Labor

For much of the industrial era, technology increased the economic premium attached to cognitive work relative to physical work. The cultural hierarchy followed the economics. Parents encouraged children to get degrees and avoid working with their hands. The successful worker increasingly sat behind a desk.

AI introduces a remarkable historical inversion. It is much easier for an AI system to produce a competent business memo than to enter a 70-year-old house, determine why water is appearing beneath a bathroom, crawl through an awkward space, discover that the actual problem differs from the homeowner's description and physically repair it.

The same applies to electricians, plumbers, mechanics, HVAC technicians, equipment repair specialists, builders and many other skilled trades. Robotics will eventually automate portions of this work too, but the physical world is extraordinarily irregular. Factories can be engineered around robots. Existing houses, automobiles, farms, commercial buildings and infrastructure cannot easily be standardized after the fact.

The skilled manual worker combines several things that are difficult to automate simultaneously: perception, diagnosis, physical dexterity, improvisation, mobility through unpredictable environments, interaction with customers and responsibility for a real-world outcome. Consequently, AI may compress the economic value of some routine cognitive work while increasing the relative value of skilled manual competence.

The irony would be substantial. The advanced technological economy could make being exceptionally good with your hands valuable again. And, as with craftsmanship, demonstrated competence will matter. A tradesperson with a documented history of solving difficult real-world problems may possess something increasingly valuable in an economy filled with inexpensive claims and synthetic representations.

Meeting an Actual Person

For decades, technology has progressively reduced the necessity of physical presence. Letters became telephone calls. Telephone calls became email. Email became messaging. Meetings became Zoom calls. Communities became social networks. Dating became profiles and algorithms. AI may push this much further.

Increasing portions of ordinary interaction may eventually occur with artificial agents. An AI can answer questions, offer advice, schedule appointments, provide companionship, teach subjects, recommend purchases and perform customer service. Some of these interactions will be superior to their human equivalents. That does not imply that human presence becomes worthless. It may produce the opposite result.

When remote interaction is effectively unlimited, being physically present with another person becomes scarce. Consider what an in-person conversation contains that text communication does not: eye contact, posture, timing, facial expressions, subtle changes in voice, shared surroundings, physical proximity and the knowledge that both people have allocated the same irreplaceable period of their lives to being in the same place.

That last element may become especially important. Digital communication is cheap partly because attention can be fragmented. Someone can answer messages while doing three other things. If someone travels two hours to have dinner with you, the cost itself communicates information. Presence is proof of attention.

This could increase the value of dinners, conferences, clubs, churches, sports teams, neighborhood gatherings, workshops, live performances and simply sitting with someone. Technology will make it easier to communicate with ten thousand people. That may make spending three uninterrupted hours with one person more valuable.

Nature as a Scarce Experience

Nature presents a related paradox. Technological environments increasingly allow people to spend nearly their entire lives inside human-created systems. Climate-controlled buildings, automobiles, screens, artificial lighting, prepared food and digital entertainment can substantially separate everyday life from the natural environment.

Virtual reality will eventually make simulated nature extraordinarily convincing. Someone may be able to sit in an apartment and experience something visually resembling Patagonia, the Serengeti or a coral reef. That could increase rather than decrease the value of knowing: I am actually here.

Real wind is not programmable. The temperature isn't set for you. The mountain does not care whether you reach the top. The ocean isn't optimized for engagement. The bird may appear or may not. Rain can ruin the afternoon. There is no reset button. These apparent disadvantages establish authenticity.

A real wilderness experience has provenance built into it because the individual physically experiences something outside the technological system. Nature also provides unusually direct sensory information: temperature, smell, wind, terrain, sound, distance, fatigue, sunlight, darkness and physical risk. These are precisely the kinds of experiences that disappear when more of life occurs through screens.

As synthetic environments improve, unsynthesized environments may acquire scarcity value. The strange outcome could be that extraordinarily advanced technology makes walking through an ordinary forest more valuable.

The Unvarnished Human Voice

Music may eventually provide one of the purest examples of the countervalue principle. Recording technology already allows extraordinary manipulation of human performance. Voices can be amplified, corrected, layered, pitch-adjusted and edited. AI can increasingly create music and voices that never existed at all.

Eventually, hearing an apparently beautiful voice through speakers may tell us almost nothing about what a particular human being can actually do. That could create enormous value at the opposite extreme.

Imagine a small room with no amplification, no microphone, no Auto-Tune, no instruments, no backing track, no elaborate lighting, no makeup or constructed visual persona, and no editing. One person stands in front of perhaps fifty people and sings. Just the human voice. Every breath is real. Every note originates in the body standing a few feet away. If the singer misses the note, everyone hears it. If the voice fills the room beautifully, everyone knows exactly what happened because there is nothing between the performer and the listener.

In a technologically saturated culture, that could become an exceptionally premium experience. The attraction would not merely be musical quality. It would be verified human capability. The audience would know: this human being can actually do this. There is something almost athletic about it. A recording of a perfect performance can be manufactured. The person standing ten feet away cannot be manufactured.

The absence of technology becomes part of the performance. The absence of makeup could reinforce the same idea, not because makeup is objectionable, but because the entire experience communicates a particular form of authenticity: Nothing is being hidden. Nothing is being corrected. Nothing is being amplified. Here is the person. Here is the voice.

The very technologies capable of creating flawless synthetic singers could therefore create a new premium category for the unvarnished singer. The imperfections might increase rather than diminish the experience because they establish its humanity.

Technology Creates Counter-Needs

There is a broader historical pattern behind all of this. Technology repeatedly eliminates a constraint and thereby creates demand for something the constraint once supplied incidentally. Cars eliminate much routine walking, and people deliberately walk for exercise. Machines eliminate physical labor, and people pay to lift heavy objects in gyms. Food abundance eliminates caloric scarcity, and dietary restraint becomes valuable. Climate control eliminates temperature extremes, and people voluntarily enter saunas.

Digital communication eliminates geographic distance, and physical presence acquires new significance. Infinite information eliminates information scarcity, and attention becomes scarce. AI reduces the cost of cognitive production, and deciding what is worth thinking about becomes increasingly important. Synthetic media makes images and voices abundant, and provenance becomes valuable.

These aren't arguments against technology. They are consequences of technological success. When technology solves one scarcity, another often becomes visible.

Short Causal Chains

There may be an even deeper attraction connecting craftsmanship, skilled trades, nature, country music and direct human interaction. They provide short causal chains: cut wood to make a table, repair a pipe and the leak stops, plant a seed and the plant grows, lift a weight and become stronger, walk a mountain and reach the summit, sing and a person hears the voice, help a person and the person's condition improves, love someone and the relationship changes.

These causal chains are comprehensible. Much of modern life operates through the opposite kind of system. Central banks, global supply chains, social-media algorithms, artificial intelligence models, bureaucracies, financial markets and geopolitical institutions contain causal chains so complicated that even specialists understand only portions of them. A person can spend years working inside a large organization without being able to identify precisely what his individual work caused.

Compare that with a carpenter looking at a table at the end of the day: I made that. That statement may acquire increasing psychological value.

Not a Rejection of Technology

None of this requires technological retreat. The future carpenter may use AI to design the table, augmented reality to visualize the joinery and sophisticated computerized equipment for part of the process, while deliberately performing the parts where human craftsmanship creates value. The person who spends Saturday hiking through a forest may spend Monday working with an extremely advanced AI system.

Someone can participate in a global digital business and still value dinner with five friends. Someone can listen to technologically sophisticated music and still pay an extraordinary premium to sit twenty feet from a woman singing without a microphone. Someone can embrace technological progress while becoming increasingly interested in country music, local communities, handmade objects and nature. There is no contradiction. Technology may be why those things become more valuable.

The MU Implication

This matters to MyUniversa because MU should not assume that technological advancement tells an individual what to value. Technology expands the possibility space. The sentient beneficiary determines what matters within it.

As artificial intelligence and automation make more things inexpensive and abundant, MU should become increasingly attentive to the things that are becoming scarce: genuine attention, provenance, physical capability, direct experience, human competence, local connection, craftsmanship, nature, presence and comprehensibility. Some will have monetary value. Others will have experiential value that never appears in GDP.

The important question isn't whether society is becoming more technological or less technological. It is: What has technology made abundant, and what has that abundance made newly scarce?

That question may identify some of the most valuable things in the coming decades: a handmade table, a plumber who can actually solve the problem, a walk through a real forest, dinner with someone who has put away the phone, or a country song telling a comprehensible story about one human life.

And perhaps, in a small room filled with people accustomed to hearing flawless synthetic voices, one woman standing without makeup, microphone, instruments or electronic assistance and opening her mouth to sing. No intermediary. No correction. No simulation. Just one sentient human being experiencing another.

In a world capable of manufacturing almost anything, the things that can be demonstrated to be real may become among the most valuable things of all.