Technology Doesn't Eliminate Scarcity. It Relocates It.

For a long time, I believed that technology gradually eliminated scarcity.

Looking back, it was an understandable assumption. Every major technological breakthrough seemed to remove a limitation that previous generations had simply learned to live with. The internet gave us access to information that was once difficult to obtain. Search engines made that information almost instantly discoverable. Cloud computing dramatically reduced the cost of computing infrastructure. More recently, AI has started to democratise capabilities that, until very recently, required years of specialised knowledge and experience.

The pattern appeared remarkably consistent. Each new wave of technology made something that was once scarce increasingly abundant.

Yet, over the years, another pattern gradually became impossible to ignore.

The original scarcity disappeared, but a different one always seemed to emerge in its place.

The more I reflected on it, the less convinced I became that technology was eliminating scarcity at all. Increasingly, it seemed to be doing something far more interesting.

For me, that realisation began with the internet, and more specifically with search. I still remember the early years of Google, when it seemed capable of uncovering almost any obscure page, specialist forum or forgotten source within seconds. Information that had previously required access, patience or luck suddenly became available to almost anyone.

Over time, however, I noticed that the problem had changed. Finding information was no longer difficult, but finding original and trustworthy information increasingly was. Search results seemed to converge towards the same highly optimised pages, while genuinely obscure sources became harder to discover. I cannot say exactly how much of this came from the exponential growth of the web and how much from the commercial incentives shaping search, but the effect was difficult to ignore.

Search had solved one scarcity remarkably well. In doing so, it had made trust, discovery and attention relatively more valuable.

At first, I assumed this was simply a consequence of the internet maturing. As I looked more closely, however, I began to notice versions of the same pattern elsewhere.

Cloud computing dramatically reduced the cost and complexity of running infrastructure, but it did not make successful technology companies commonplace. If anything, it shifted the source of differentiation towards architecture, integration and operational excellence. The scarcity had moved.

AI appears to be following a remarkably similar path. It is rapidly democratizing capabilities that, until recently, required years of study and experience. Research, writing, software development, analysis and even strategic thinking are becoming increasingly accessible to almost anyone willing to use the right tools.

Yet I find it difficult to believe that this will make exceptional companies, leaders or professionals equally abundant.

If history is any guide, the opposite seems more likely.

This gradually led me to a different way of thinking about technological progress.

Perhaps every major technological revolution follows the same underlying pattern. It democratizes access to something that was previously scarce and, in doing so, reduces its ability to differentiate. The capability itself does not become less valuable. It simply becomes less exceptional because many more people can now access it.

At the same time, something else begins to increase in relative value.

What took me longer to understand was that abundance rarely changes the value of one capability in isolation. It changes the relative value of everything around it. As one capability becomes commonplace, others become more valuable, not because they have suddenly improved, but because they have become the new constraint.

When information became abundant, the ability to filter, interpret and trust information became more valuable. As AI begins to democratize access to analysis, writing, coding and many other forms of knowledge work, it seems reasonable to expect that differentiation will once again migrate somewhere else.

I suspect that "somewhere else" is not a single capability but a collection of deeply human ones. The advantage will increasingly belong to people who can understand objectives before proposing solutions, connect ideas across disciplines and exercise judgement when there is no obvious answer. Creativity may become more valuable not because AI is incapable of producing ideas, but because access to similar tools and knowledge makes genuinely original thinking harder to find. Trust and accountability will matter for a similar reason: someone will still need to decide which outputs should be acted upon and accept responsibility for what happens next.

None of these qualities are new, and technology has not suddenly made them important. What appears to be changing is their relative value, as many of the capabilities surrounding them become easier to access.

Whenever a new technology emerges, the first question we ask is usually, "What will it replace?" We try to estimate which jobs will disappear, which industries will be disrupted or which capabilities will become obsolete.

Over time, I have become less convinced that this is the most useful place to begin.

History suggests that technology rarely eliminates the need to create value. Instead, it changes where value is created. As one capability becomes widely available, differentiation gradually migrates to the next layer. The organisations and individuals who adapt quickly benefit from that shift. Those who continue competing on what has already become abundant often discover that yesterday's competitive advantage has quietly become today's commodity.

This is one of the reasons I find discussions about AI both fascinating and, at times, incomplete. Much of the debate revolves around what AI can do better than humans. A more interesting question, at least in my view, is what becomes relatively more valuable precisely because AI can now do those things.

The greatest opportunities may therefore emerge less from the capability that has just become abundant than from identifying the new scarcity before everyone else does.

The more I think about it, the less I see this as an observation about AI, the internet or any particular technology.

It seems to describe something more fundamental about progress itself.

Looking back, what surprises me is not that technology changes the world. That has always happened. What surprises me is how consistently it changes the location of competitive advantage. Solving one constraint rarely makes the environment simpler; it usually creates the conditions for a different and often less visible constraint to emerge.

Perhaps that is why so many people underestimate technological change. They focus on what becomes easier and overlook what becomes more valuable as a consequence. By the time the new scarcity becomes obvious, the competitive advantage has often already shifted.

If that pattern continues, then AI should not primarily be understood as a tool for replacing human capabilities. It should be understood as another step in a much longer process of relocating where value resides.

That may also explain why many of the capabilities I considered important when I started my career nearly three decades ago still matter today. Good judgement, critical thinking, the ability to connect ideas across disciplines and the willingness to question assumptions have not become obsolete. Some of the technical and analytical capabilities surrounding them are becoming easier to acquire or reproduce, but the need to make sense of complexity remains.

In fact, the conversations that clients value most are still rarely about access to information alone. They tend to revolve around objectives, constraints, trade-offs, incentives and responsibility, which are precisely the areas where generic capability is least useful without a deep understanding of the environment in which it will be applied.

Looking back, I suspect I was asking the wrong question for many years.

Whenever a new technology emerged, I tended to focus on what it might replace: jobs, industries or capabilities that appeared vulnerable to the next wave of change.

Those are interesting questions, but they may not be the most useful ones.

History suggests that every major technological revolution has made something abundant that was previously scarce. In doing so, it has also changed where value resides. The winners were rarely those who simply adopted the new technology first. More often, they were the ones who recognised where differentiation had quietly migrated and adapted before everyone else.

The more enduring lesson may be that technology does not eliminate scarcity so much as relocate it. The mistake is not assuming that technology creates abundance, because it clearly does. The mistake is assuming that abundance destroys value, when more often it changes where value resides.

Which may be why, whenever the next technological wave arrives, the most useful question is not simply what the technology will do, but what will become scarce once its capabilities become abundant.