Before the advent of the Internet, culture was driven by derivations. Derivations of ideas, concepts, and thoughts that were once original, but then, through the impact of other people, those ideas were watered down. This was a phenomenon most nakedly seen in the creative fields, and more carefully hidden in the more materially oriented fields. But derivation from an original idea is something that human beings have been doing for a long, long time.

With the coming of the Internet, though, this process of derivation increased in speed. Because the volume of people who had the ability to publish their ideas–original or not–increased by an exponential factor. With such an increase in speed from hard-won original thought to cheaply bought derivation, the work of being an “authentic” individual, with a unique perspective, shifted from being hard, to being difficult.

And in the future, with our LLM toys and tools, this shift will move from being difficult to seeming to be impossible. As a matter of fact, this shift is already beginning to occur. This is not because we don’t have original ideas. And it isn’t because we have an avalanche of slop derivations. And it isn’t because humans are lazy and would rather play the easy, short-term game of just copying slop rather than doing the hard work of coming up with an original idea.

The shift is happening because when humans with access to mass-scale communication technology get together, it takes a while for the humans to determine what the hard work is that is scarce, and thus creates outcomes that are valuable and worth paying for. Of course, humans tend to align to the belief–stated and unstated–that what is scarce and valuable is only what is materially beneficial. But that’s not true. Nor is that particularly an original alignment.

It’s going to take a long time to figure out scarcity in a world of seeming idea abundance. And we’re going to, all the while, be searching for an original idea.