The Inelasticity Of Attention
Eric Seufert writing in The Prosperous Society:
What's the probability of a user discovering, through entirely random organic diligence, any given product on an infinite digital retail shelf? It's zero.[...]
When we talk about generative AI, we tend to focus on the reduction in marginal production cost. Code generation becomes cheaper. Ad creative production becomes cheaper. Iteration becomes cheaper. Entire product surfaces can be scaffolded and deployed with dramatically less capital than even a few years ago. But trivially, when production becomes cheaper, more things get produced. When more things get produced, more firms compete for the same pool of human attention. And when more firms compete for a resource that does not scale, which human attention doesn't, the price of accessing that resource rises.
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AI will absolutely produce a proliferation of niche products, utilities, and small businesses. But the number of scaled winners in any given category remains constrained by distribution economics. And scale is gated by the cost of attention.
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The ceiling in this context is not about whether software can be built, but about whether independent distribution can be sustained at scale when attention and network density are scarce.
Another reminder that the scarce thing is not output.
AI makes it cheaper to compete for attention. It also creates a lot more competition.
The retail shelf keeps growing. The day doesn't.