Intelligence Abstracted and Commoditised in a Token economy
Beneath all the AI buzz and hype, there is something very beautiful happening that I’m super excited about. All of human intelligence being abstracted and commoditised for all. And we are just in nascent stages of it.
What if Intelligence itself is as commoditised as electricity? Well, that is what we can look forward to in a token economy.
The new Gutenberg moment
For vast majority of human civilisation we drew pictures in our caves to tell stories and pass down information. As we got more creative, we wrote folk songs and sang dancing in circles. We wrote on whatever we could find, tree barks, clay, parchments and what not.
Gutenberg, came in and said hold my beer bro and we wrote books and built libraries. Fast forward to 1950s we built computers and got hooked to screens. 90s bought internet revolution and information was just dial away.
All this while we still had to internalise intelligence and form mental models but something very interesting is happening with AI, intelligence can be abstracted externally and commoditised at a huge scale.
People passing it off as just AI slop and statistical tricks still cant deny that abstracting language is nothing short of magic, their dismissal itself is statistical trick of language.
The Gutenberg moment was cool because it really commoditised information to masses. I think we are seeing a new Gutenberg moment but instead of paper its tokens this time.
Tokens, the new commodity of Intelligence
The ripple effects are already starting to show in ways that feel both subtle and seismic. Consider how this changes the fundamental economics of expertise. For centuries, specialised knowledge was a scarce resource - you needed years of training, access to libraries, mentorship from other experts.
Now that cognitive labor can be commoditised, we're seeing the emergence of what you might call augmented generalists - people who can rapidly acquire functional competence across domains that would have taken years to master.
The social implications are staggering too. We're potentially looking at the collapse of traditional knowledge hierarchies and credentialing systems. When anyone can engage sophisticated reasoning about complex topics, the gatekeeping function of experts shifts dramatically. This could be profoundly democratising.
We're moving from a world where intelligence was fundamentally embodied - locked in individual minds, institutions, and exclusive communities - to one where it becomes ambient and accessible.
It would be interesting to see what this could lead to because intelligence is not the only thing we commoditised this decade. We also managed to find ways to commoditise carbon emissions, water, and climate disasters.
Carbon credits turned atmospheric capacity into a market. Water futures turned a basic necessity into a financial instrument. Climate disaster bonds turned catastrophic risk into investable assets. And now tokens are turning cognitive processes into computational commodities.