Just as the Industrial Revolution devalued physical strength, AI is devaluing raw intellectual output. As intelligence becomes abundant, value moves to uniquely human qualities like judgment, intuition, taste, and wisdom. AI can determine what is probable, but only humans can decide what is worth wanting.

As AI automates technical fields like coding and even scientific discovery, cultural and economic value will shift to areas where human connection is irreplaceable, such as literature, art, and curation. This creates a 'revenge of the humanities' scenario where uniquely human skills become paramount.

AI's greatest impact on economics will be the ability to run complex, agent-based simulations. This allows economists to model the dynamic, equilibrium responses of millions of economic actors to policy changes—like a Fed balance sheet reduction—providing a much richer understanding than traditional, static models allow.

Demis Hassabis foresees AI enabling new scientific disciplines. He suggests that highly accurate AI simulations could transform fields like economics into hard sciences by allowing for the kind of repeated, controlled experiments that are currently impossible in the real world.

As AI commoditizes execution and intellectual labor, the only remaining scarce human skill will be judgment: the wisdom to know what to build, why, and for whom. This shifts economic value from effort and hard work to discernment and taste.

AI agents that explain equations or decompose forecast changes are seen as complementary technologies. They automate routine tasks, allowing economists to focus on enhancing model quality, building new models, or expanding coverage, rather than reducing headcount. This follows the Jevons paradox, where efficiency gains increase demand.

AI's primary impact is not wholesale human replacement but rather collapsing the middle of the value pyramid by automating routine knowledge work. The value of human workers will shift to higher-level judgment and strategic oversight, where AI can structure options and simulate outcomes, but humans retain final say due to liability concerns.

Applying the economic principle of comparative advantage, even if AI achieves absolute superiority in all tasks, humans should specialize where their advantage is greatest relative to AI. This will likely be high-level "thinking," as human attention remains the scarcest resource in the collaboration.

AI will soon surpass most humans at executing policy analysis. The comparative advantage for think tank professionals will shift from analysis to inquiry. Human creativity, curiosity, and the ability to formulate novel 'why' questions will become the most valuable skills, as AI is trained on past data.