The real lesson is to accept scarcity, respect prices, and seek your comparative advantage in a world where AI is just another tool—not to retreat into a lonely, inefficient attempt to do by hand what your tools could help you transcend. View quoted note →

Even if AI seems superior at many specific tasks, it cannot replace the human ability to set aims, make judgments, and shoulder uncertainty. In that sense, AI remains a tool—a powerful one—while humans supply the values and intentions that steer it. The relationship between them is not rivalry but interdependence. View quoted note →

However powerful the machines become, you still face the same basic constraint: you are limited. You have only so many hours, so much attention, so much energy. Every decision you make is an attempt to move from a state you value less toward one you value more. Choosing one course of action always means leaving another undone. The value of that forgone alternative—the thing you could have done instead—is your opportunity cost. Now add AI to the mix. You still have the same 24 hours, but you also have access to tools that can draft emails, summarize documents, generate code snippets, sketch marketing copy, and filter noise. These tools are not magic. They are ways of rearranging scarce resources—your time, your employer’s capital, server capacity—in the hope of satisfying people’s wants more effectively. View quoted note →

Scarcity and the Machine: Opportunity Cost in the Age of Artificial Intelligence My latest piece with the Mises Institute https://mises.org/mises-wire/scarcity-and-machine-opportunity-cost-age-artificial-intelligence

You're gonna carry that weight.

Spotify

jazz is for ordinary people

berlioz · jazz is for ordinary people · Song · 2023

The challenge, then, isn’t to beat the machines but to learn to work meaningfully alongside them.

Spotify

The Mountain (feat. Dennis Hopper, Ajay Prasanna, Anoushka Shankar, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash)

Gorillaz, Dennis Hopper, Ajay Prasanna, Anoushka Shankar, Amaan Ali Bangash, Ayaan Ali Bangash · The Mountain · Song · 2026

What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it. If the presumption of the modern mind, which will not respect anything that is not consciously controlled by individual reason, does not learn in time where to stop, we may, as Edmund Burke warned us, “be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.” - F. A. Hayek

While it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are the indispensable bases of a free civilization, it may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilization once these foundations are destroyed. - F. A. Hayek

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” — J.R.R. Tolkien

The real lesson is to accept scarcity, respect prices, and seek your comparative advantage in a world where AI is just another tool—not to retreat into a lonely, inefficient attempt to do by hand what your tools could help you transcend.

Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment

The Property and Freedom Society

Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment

– Other PFS books – | Contents | Audio | Translations | Media/Press | Bibliographical | Correspondence | Photos | Tributes-obituaries-comme...

@Lyn Alden

Regardless of the advancements in AI, the central question does not change: given scarcity, what should you do with your time, and what should you let the tools do?

Whenever people differ—and they always do—in skills, tools, knowledge, and circumstances, there exists some pattern of specialization and exchange that makes all of them better off than they would be alone. Crucially, no one needs to know this pattern in advance. No one has to sit down with a spreadsheet and assign roles. The market is the discovery process that finds and constantly updates the pattern of comparative advantages.

We trade not because we are poor and lack things, but because trade expands the range of ends we can achieve.

"Only because men are in fact unequal can we treat them equally. If all men were completely equal in their gifts and inclinations, we should have to treat them differently in order to achieve any sort of social organization. Fortunately, they are not equal; and it is only owing to this that the differentiation of functions need not be determined by the arbitrary decision of some organizing will but that, after creating formal equality of the rules applying in the same manner to all, we can leave each individual to find his own level. There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means, as De Tocqueville described it, “a new form of servitude.”" F. A. Hayek

"The real question, therefore, is not whether man is, or ought to be, guided by selfish motives but whether we can allow him to be guided in his actions by those immediate consequences which he can know and care for or whether he ought to be made to do what seems appropriate to somebody else who is supposed to possess a fuller comprehension of the significance of of these actions to society as a whole." F. A. Hayek

"true individualism believes on the contrary that, if left free, men will often achieve more than individual human reason could design or foresee." F. A. Hayek