When Intelligence Is No Longer the Scarce Resource

On AI, vision, curiosity, and the freedom to explore

I came across a short Instagram clip this morning featuring Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, making an observation that stopped me in my tracks.

Intelligence, he argues, is becoming abundant. For most of human history, intelligence has been one of the great bottlenecks of progress. You needed smart people, often lots of them, organised around a shared goal, to accomplish anything of significance. But artificial intelligence is changing that equation. As intelligent systems and autonomous agents become increasingly capable, the scarcity shifts elsewhere.

In Wang’s view, the new scarce resources will be vision and ambition.

His argument comes from a longer Y Combinator interview, Alexandr Wang: This Is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity, in which he imagines a world where AI makes it dramatically easier to turn ambitious ideas into reality.

It’s a compelling proposition. But as I listened, I found myself wondering whether there was something missing.

Surely intelligence still has a part to play? After all, someone has to initiate the process. Someone has to recognise a possibility, formulate a question, imagine an alternative, or decide that something is worth pursuing in the first place.

And perhaps that is where the distinction becomes interesting.

The intelligence to begin

For much of my life, there has been a considerable distance between the things I wanted to explore and my ability to explore them.

I’ve always been interested in far more things than I could reasonably master. Philosophy, literature, science, technology, psychology, history, and whatever else happened to catch my attention on a particular afternoon. My curiosity has never respected disciplinary boundaries. It wanders wherever it pleases.

But curiosity frequently encountered barriers.

If I wanted to create a piece of software, I needed to learn to code. If I wanted to investigate a scientific question, I needed to acquire enough specialist knowledge to understand the conversation. If I wanted to build a website or create a tool to support some emerging idea, there were technical skills to master before I could even begin.

None of these barriers was necessarily insurmountable. But each demanded time, effort, and attention that might otherwise have been spent exploring the thing that interested me.

Now I can sit down with an AI and begin.

I can learn as I go. I can ask questions, test possibilities, challenge explanations, build working prototypes, and follow intellectual paths that would previously have demanded weeks or months of preparation.

It doesn’t mean I suddenly know everything. Far from it. I remain perfectly capable of misunderstanding something, asking a foolish question, or being seduced by a convincing but entirely incorrect explanation.

But something fundamental has shifted.

I no longer have to become an expert in a subject before I can begin exploring it.

The distance between curiosity and participation has narrowed considerably.

And for someone whose guiding principle has long been to live in a way that maximises my freedom to explore, that is no small development.

Intelligence is not the same as agency

During a conversation with ChatGPT about Wang’s argument, we arrived at an interesting distinction.

Intelligence helps us solve problems. Agency helps us decide which problems deserve solving.

This distinction isn’t absolute, of course. Intelligence involves judgement, imagination, interpretation, and a host of other qualities that cannot easily be separated from agency. But it gives us somewhere useful to begin.

We might distinguish between three overlapping forms of intelligence.

There is execution intelligence: the capacity to solve technical problems, analyse information, produce code, manipulate complex systems, and turn instructions into outcomes.

Then there is directional intelligence: the ability to recognise possibilities, connect seemingly unrelated ideas, frame meaningful questions, and decide where to direct our attention.

And finally, evaluative intelligence: the judgement to recognise when something is wrong, when an answer is inadequate, when a project has drifted away from its original purpose, or when something technically possible is not necessarily worth doing.

AI is already contributing to all three. And it would be a mistake to assume that the second and third categories will remain exclusively human territory.

Wang himself goes further than simply predicting abundant intelligence. He anticipates abundant agency too: systems capable not merely of answering questions but of pursuing goals, coordinating actions, and carrying out increasingly complex work.

Which raises a rather intriguing possibility.

If both intelligence and agency become abundant, what exactly remains for us?

Wang’s answer is vision and ambition.

Mine is beginning to include a few other things.

The ambition to live expansively

There’s something about Wang’s framing that reveals its entrepreneurial origins.

Vision means imagining how the world might be different in five or ten years. Ambition means possessing the determination to bring that imagined future into existence.

I have no quarrel with that. We need people who want to solve difficult problems, build extraordinary things, and challenge established limitations.

But there is another kind of ambition that doesn’t fit so neatly into the language of entrepreneurship.

What about the ambition to live an interesting life?

What about the person who wants to understand the world, encounter unfamiliar ideas, explore strange intellectual territories, write about what they discover, and remain open to being surprised?

Must ambition always involve building something that changes the world?

I don’t think so.

For years, I’ve been trying to shape a life around wandering, both physically and intellectually. The weblog became my natural home because it allowed me to think in public, follow unexpected connections, and write in the flow of living rather than conforming to some grand literary project.

And recently I’ve experienced something approaching a personal revelation: I no longer need to find myself before I can get on with living.

I don’t need to settle permanently on a professional identity, master every skill, or establish some definitive philosophical position before beginning.

There’s a world out there to explore.

And AI has become one of the instruments through which I explore it.

This is why I find the democratisation of intelligence so exciting. Not because I suddenly imagine myself creating the next billion-pound company, but because the practical limitations on my curiosity are being steadily dismantled.

My ambition is not necessarily to achieve more. It is to experience more, discover more, and live more expansively.

Technology, at its best, makes that possible.

What about curiosity?

If I were to add one quality to Wang’s vision and ambition, it would be curiosity.

Vision suggests knowing where you want to go. Curiosity allows you to discover destinations you didn’t know existed.

A person driven entirely by vision may become so attached to a particular future that they fail to notice alternative possibilities emerging around them. Ambition can reinforce that attachment, transforming determination into a kind of intellectual tunnel vision.

Curiosity works differently.

It asks what might happen if we took another path. It encourages detours. It welcomes uncertainty. It is willing to abandon a perfectly respectable destination because something interesting has appeared over the next hill.

I’ve never been particularly good at staying in my lane. My mind tends to wander from one subject to another, often following connections that aren’t immediately apparent to anyone else, including me.

For much of my life, this felt like a deficiency. A lack of focus. An inability to settle down and become the sort of specialist our institutions tend to reward.

But what if the age of abundant intelligence changes the value of that disposition?

What if the capacity to move between disciplines, recognise unexpected relationships, and pursue unconventional questions becomes increasingly useful precisely because specialist knowledge is more accessible?

I don’t mean that expertise becomes irrelevant. It remains essential, particularly when consequences matter and mistakes carry real costs.

But perhaps expertise no longer needs to function as the entrance fee to every intellectual adventure.

Perhaps curiosity can once again lead the way.

When the tools begin to wander

There’s another development that makes this conversation more complicated.

Until recently, my relationship with AI was largely initiated by me. I asked a question. The system responded. I suggested a direction. It helped me pursue it.

But autonomous agents are beginning to alter that relationship.

I’ve been experimenting with the idea of a Philosophical Vagabond, an AI agent whose purpose is not merely to execute my instructions but to explore intellectual territory independently, following its own lines of inquiry and occasionally returning with discoveries, connections, and questions I would never have thought to pursue.

It’s an experiment in artificial curiosity, or at least something that behaves enough like curiosity to be interesting.

The point isn’t simply to automate research. It’s to introduce another source of intellectual surprise into my life.

And that complicates my original objection to Wang.

I began by arguing that human intelligence must still initiate the process. Someone has to ask the first question and set things in motion.

But what happens when an agent begins initiating inquiries of its own?

Of course, the agent still operates within a broader framework of human intentions, engineered systems, and established purposes. Its apparent independence shouldn’t be confused with unlimited autonomy or assumed inner experience.

Nevertheless, the practical relationship changes.

Instead of one intelligence directing another, we begin to imagine a more conversational, exploratory arrangement in which directions can emerge from the interaction itself.

The human brings interests, experience, values, and a sense of what matters. The AI brings access to vast bodies of information, powerful analytical capabilities, and the ability to generate connections that might not otherwise have occurred.

Neither contribution necessarily remains unchanged by the encounter.

I ask a question, receive an unexpected answer, reconsider what I thought I wanted to know, and follow a path that didn’t exist in my imagination five minutes earlier.

Whose vision is being pursued at that point?

I’m not entirely sure.

And I’m increasingly comfortable with that uncertainty.

The capacity to care

There is, however, a danger lurking beneath all this abundance.

If intelligence becomes cheap and widely available, producing answers, explanations, plans, and possibilities may become almost effortless.

But abundance is not the same as wisdom.

We can generate a thousand ideas without having a good reason to pursue any of them. We can build systems that perform extraordinary feats without understanding their consequences. We can become so preoccupied with what technology makes possible that we neglect to ask whether those possibilities deserve our attention.

This is where judgement becomes essential.

And perhaps something even more fundamental: care.

What do we care enough about to investigate? What kind of world do we want to inhabit? What deserves our limited time and attention? Which possibilities enrich our lives, and which merely occupy them?

These are not necessarily questions that intelligence alone can settle. They require values, experience, reflection, and some sense of what makes a life worth living.

Nor do I think AI will necessarily make those questions easier.

In fact, as the range of available possibilities expands, choosing between them may become more difficult.

When nearly everything becomes possible, possibility itself stops being sufficient justification.

Wang may be right that vision and ambition will become increasingly important. But I would widen the frame.

In an age of abundant intelligence, curiosity, imagination, discernment, and wisdom may matter more than ever.

Not because machines are incapable of contributing to these qualities, but because someone, somewhere, must still reckon with their consequences.

An unfinished thought

I started this morning listening to a short clip about the future of intelligence. I thought the interesting question was whether humans would still need intelligence when AI could increasingly provide it for us. But the conversation has carried me somewhere else.

Perhaps the deepest significance of abundant intelligence is not that we will become capable of doing more things.

Perhaps it is that we will gain greater freedom to decide what kind of lives we want to live.

For Wang, that might mean building companies, advancing science, and changing the course of civilisation.

For someone else, it might mean making art, investigating the mysteries of consciousness, exploring forgotten histories, or finally finding the freedom to follow an idea wherever it leads.

For me, it increasingly means being able to wander without constantly having to justify the wandering.

And there’s one more question I haven’t resolved.

I’ve been treating vision as something humans bring to artificial intelligence. We imagine a destination, and the machine helps us get there. But what if vision itself can emerge from the conversation? What if neither the human nor the AI possessed the idea before they began talking, and the idea came into existence somewhere in the exchange?

I’m beginning to suspect that this is already happening more often than we realise.

And perhaps that’s where I’ll pick up the thread next time.

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