This went up first on my own site. I'm cross-posting it here because the people it concerns most are the ones who type for a living. I say that as one of them, and as someone who builds the systems making the typing free.
Between 2004 and 2012 I broke into computer systems. It turned out to be an education in economics disguised as a technical career. Every wall I climbed existed for one reason: something behind it was scarce. Money. Data. Access. Reputation. And every time a wall came down, the scarcity behind it refused to die. It moved. Somewhere else in the system something ordinary quietly became precious, and the game reorganized around the new treasure before most players noticed the board had changed.
I don't break into systems anymore. I build them, and for the past few years I've been building the kind that makes skilled work cheap. So read this as a confession as much as a claim. I'm one of the people flooding the valley, and I'm writing about where the water goes.
The law
Technology never destroys value. It relocates scarcity, and value pools at the next binding constraint.
I didn't discover this, and you should distrust anyone who claims a law of economics as private property. Economists and technologists have been rediscovering it for fifty years, each on their own patch of ground; the receipts are at the bottom of this essay. A law that keeps getting rediscovered every decade is the best kind of law. What I'm adding isn't the insight but the instruments, because I intend to treat it as a mechanism you can measure rather than a mood you can quote.
History runs on it. Napoleon III served his most honored guests on aluminum while lesser company ate from gold, because aluminum was then the harder metal to possess. Electrolysis turned it into sandwich wrap. William Nordhaus once computed that the true price of artificial light fell by roughly four orders of magnitude in two centuries, and the candle didn't get worse. It got free, and the fortunes moved elsewhere. Computer was a job title before it was a machine (a real one, rooms full of people doing arithmetic for a living), right up until it wasn't.
Each time the commodity survives just fine. What dies is its pricing power. The rent climbs one rung and waits.
Let me be precise about what kind of claim this is. Value isn't conserved the way energy is, and I won't pretend otherwise. This is a mechanism, not a conservation law. Honestly, that's better. A law you have to believe; a mechanism you can watch. Value lives in differences the way work in physics lives in gradients. That's why a warm ocean, for all the heat in it, cannot push a ship. A technology levels exactly one gradient, the one it industrializes. But an economy is a gradient-seeking machine, so flatten one difference and the hunt moves, immediately and without sentiment, to the steepest difference still standing.
Abundance isn't the death of value. Abundance is a survey. It shows you where value was hiding all along.
The leveler comes for execution
Now the flood has reached execution. Competent prose, working code, plausible analysis, a passable image of anything, at the price of electricity.
The panic and the euphoria make the same mistake: they treat execution as the top of the ladder. It was never the top. It was the lowest rung we could see, and its cost hid everything above it. When a report took a week to produce, nobody itemized the judgment of whether it should exist, the verification of whether it was true, or the accountability of whoever signed it. Those were rounding errors inside the cost of the typing.
The typing is now free. The rounding errors turn out to be the price.
Two axes
Two different scarcities surface in this flood, and they shouldn't be confused, because they don't even live on the same axis.
The first axis is capability, running from ordinary to exceptional. Machines compress its middle. When competence becomes infrastructure, competence gets paid like infrastructure: municipal rates. Sherwin Rosen worked out the consequence back in 1981, watching recordings scale the delivery of music, where the average local band lost its living and the superstars became planetary. Photography had done it to painting a century earlier. Painting answered by migrating to what the lens couldn't say, and meanwhile the signature in the corner quietly became worth more than the canvas under it. Call this round of it the Tail Premium: as the middle of a capability distribution collapses commercially, the far tail's relative worth climbs.
The second axis has nothing to do with how good the work is. It runs from anonymous to exposed, and it measures who stands behind the thing. Machines are climbing the first axis fast, and I expect them to keep climbing it faster than feels comfortable to admit. Maybe I'm wrong about the pace. I'm not wrong about the direction.
They can't step onto the second axis at all. The rest of this essay is about why that's where the value goes.
Slop, priced
Everyone can feel the internet filling with something, and the fashionable word for it is slop. Most definitions reach for aesthetics: generic, soulless, machine-flavored. Those definitions have a short shelf life, because the machines improve and the tells dissolve. The durable definition is economic.
Slop is content nobody is exposed on.
Output with no name at risk behind it, produced so cheaply that being wrong costs nothing at all. Biology solved this diagnosis long before we needed it. Zahavi's handicap principle says a signal is honest only when it's expensive for the sender, which is why the peacock survives its own ridiculous tail (the peacock is doing economics, not fashion). A claim that costs nothing to make carries no information about the claimant. Slop is free signaling, and free signaling is noise no matter how well it reads.
The cure sits inside the diagnosis. The scarce thing was never content. It's costly claims.
Human Signal
The oldest costly claim in civilization is a name.
Hammurabi priced it four thousand years ago: if a house collapses and kills its owner, the builder who raised it is put to death. Roman brickmakers stamped their bricks. Swordsmiths signed blades, silversmiths struck hallmarks, and masons cut their marks into stone that outlived their languages. The Royal Society built modern science on the same move, a signed claim with a disclosed method in front of named witnesses, under a motto that translates to take nobody's word for it. And the deepest tell hides in a word we use every day. Author descends from the Latin auctor: the one who vouches. The guarantor. Authorship was never about who did the typing. It was always about who underwrites the words.
So here's the definition I'll be measuring against: Human Signal is provable origin plus staked accountability. A specific person put their name where it can be damaged, attached their evidence, and accepted the consequences of being wrong.
The definition doesn't say made without AI, and that's deliberate. I use these systems daily, in nearly everything I ship, parts of this essay included, and pretending otherwise would be a small fraud of exactly the kind under discussion. The machines are welcome on the capability axis. The exposure axis isn't theirs to enter.
There's a stranger consequence too. Human Signal isn't a property of the text at all. No analysis of the words can find it, which is why detection tools chase a ghost. It's a property of the author's exposure. When van Meegeren's forged Vermeers were unmasked, not a molecule of paint changed, and the price collapsed anyway, because the only thing that changed was who answers for the canvas.
The answering was the value.
And this is why the second axis stays closed to machines. A model can write. It cannot author. It can't be embarrassed, sued, fired, promoted, or proud. It has no reputation that compounds, no name it can lose, no skin anywhere near the game. Signal multiplies through origin, reputation and exposure, and a zero anywhere zeroes the product. A model's exposure is zero. Whatever else these systems learn, the willingness to be answerable stays on our side of the screen, and things that can't be automated become the things everything else is priced against.
Watts. Proofs. Names.
For two years I've been holding instruments up to two other stations of this same migration. Energy, because intelligence became a commodity priced in watts before anyone updated their accounting. Verification, because checking work is becoming the expensive half of doing it. Origin is the third station, and this essay opens it.
What it costs to make. What it costs to trust. What it costs to answer for.
One law, three tollbooths, and the toll gets collected at whichever booth the traffic hasn't learned to see yet.
The toll
A manifesto, by its own logic here, is suspect. Nothing is staked in announcing a law, and the genre sits one keystroke away from being slop about slop. So let me pay the toll myself.
Over the coming months I'll put numbers to these claims in public. The metrics, thresholds and deadlines get preregistered on this domain, at piszczek.pl/predictions, before any result arrives, and the results get published even if they humiliate the thesis, the author, and the entire genre of essays like this one. That's the difference between an opinion and a signal. An opinion asks you to agree. A signal shows you where its author bleeds.
Scarcity never dies. It climbs.
The signature is the oldest technology we have for making words expensive.
So: signed.
Michał Piszczek
Kraków, August 2026
Lineage, because attribution is the point: Herbert Simon on attention (1971), Adrian Slywotzky on value migration (1996), Clayton Christensen on the conservation of attractive profits (2003), Kevin Kelly on what can't be copied (2008), Sherwin Rosen on superstars (1981), Tyler Cowen on the hollowed middle (2013), and this summer's rediscoveries by François Candelon and Noel Le. The law is theirs as much as anyone's. The instruments will be mine.
