The Evolution of Scarcity

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The Evolution of Scarcity

Entrepreneurship in the Age of Abundant Intelligence.

Every age defines its entrepreneur by the scarcity that shapes it. As intelligence becomes abundant, that definition has to be redrawn. This essay names the actor such abundance produces: the Intellipreneur.

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The historic entrepreneur scaled by adding people, because capable thinking was scarce and lived only in human minds. That is changing. Intelligence is becoming abundant and close to free to compose, and when the scarce thing stops being scarce, the figure defined against its scarcity has to be redrawn.
The essay follows a single line of thought, from Richard Cantillon and Jean-Baptiste Say to Stephen O’Grady, each of whom named the decisive economic actor of their age, and asks who that actor is now. Its answer is the Intellipreneur: the founder who leads with humanity and scales with intelligence. Where the old firm grew by headcount, the Intellipreneur composes intelligence at near-zero marginal cost, and gains leverage without adding people.
What stays human, the essay argues, is not judgement waiting to be automated but something categorical: meaning, responsibility, care, and the answerability that only a person can hold. That is what makes the Intellipreneur durable rather than the figure of a single decade. Along the way it introduces the Intellicoder, the domain-heavy, judgement-led builder of the present moment, and the frontier where each function is handed to a person or a machine under risk.

What the essay covers

The lineage
How Cantillon, Say and O’Grady each named the scarce and decisive actor of their age.

The premise
Why intelligence is becoming abundant, engaging Sequoia’s “Services: The New Software”.
Leverage without headcount
Why firms once grew by hiring, drawing on Coase, and why that logic now inverts.
The categorical residue
The case that humanity, not judgement, is the part that does not automate.
The principal in a world of agents
The Intellipreneur read through the economics of agency.
The Intellicoder
The perishable, responsible domain-heavy frontier role of the present moment.
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