I want to argue that intelligence may be unique among all resources on the planet. It may be the only resource we create that sees truly infinite, insatiable demand.

Pricing abundance is tricky. Netflix, Spotify, and millions of software apps are offered at a fixed price for unlimited use. That works — they make money — because in fact, there is not unlimited use of them. We get satiated pretty quickly. We only watch so many hours, listen for limited hours, or eventually stop scrolling. This may not be true of AI. It looks like the demand for AI can exceed our own bounded time.

This is not true for other resources we create. When food and calories were scarce, we never imagined anyone would walk by an all-you-can-eat buffet and not take a bite. When clothes were scarce we never imagined anyone would not keep a hat they were handed for free. But it turns out that some of our most basic demands are in fact not unlimited. We can become satiated with food, with clothing, with entertainment, with shelter, and even with companionship (most people top out at 150 friends).

We dream of a world where we all have just a little more than we need. That world is often called utopia, and most commonly believed to be impossible. After all, to satisfy everyone with more than they need would require an infinite amount of resources. At least that is a common belief. However as abundance in some areas of life becomes more common these days, we see evidence that our consumption of many resources is not unlimited. And it may be that very few resources actually have real unlimited or insatiable appetites.

There are a couple of resources that seem to be in insatiable demand, such as energy, or bandwidth. However energy is not as insatiable as it appears. Folks who have massive solar for their homes have abundant “free” (as in unmetered) energy. And while they may “waste” energy by keeping the lights on during the day, or running  air conditioners all the time, at some point, they just can not use any more energy. The same with bandwidth. At first screens and phone calls had noticeable low resolution, and we wanted more and more bandwidth and storage. But at a certain point more pixels and more megabytes simply don’t matter. We may not have reached the point where there are no more improvements — we still need convincing 3-dimensional immersive worlds indistinguishable from reality — but it seems clear that our senses can be satiated.

Health care in another that has often been declared as under “insatiable demand” because it is hard to provide freely.  But the odd thing about health care is no one really wants infinite amounts of health care, because it costs you time and hassle to get it. Even when it is monetarily free, it is not really free to you. Ideally, in a perfect world, you would need no care at all because you would be perfectly healthy. In fact you want minimum care; the least amount of super great care. If you are sucking up huge gobs of care, that’s a sad story you want to avoid. You do want unlimited potential care, but not unlimited care. I have some friends who run a boutique medical service for billionaires. For a generous mind-boggling retaining fee, they offer 24/7 deeply personal unlimited medical care. It’s all you can use for a fixed fee. And yet their clients rarely use much of it (with some exceptions for emergencies). Their clients are NOT consuming their services 24/7, draining it out because it is “free.” When you give the option of unlimited health care, most people most of the time have limited use.

That’s true for individuals. What about society at large? Even though there is likely no insatiable demand for resources, there is growing demand at the society level, primarily because the human population continues to grow, and a greater portion of that population is getting the wealth to afford the resources. In addition, progress tends to lower the costs per unit for every resource, and that cheaper supply increases more uses, so consumption in total aggregate balloons.  That means that if there is a limited supply, and technology figures out how to need less of it, we will still use more of it. This is called the Jevons Paradox. So while there is not insatiable demands for resources, there can be exponentially expanding demand collectively.

This is the pattern we seem to see with AI to date. It is perhaps the fastest exploited resource we ever made, with the fastest per capita adoption and the fastest increase in hourly usage. But this is just the First Wave.

The First Wave of AIs is measured in humans. How many people have accounts and are using it? Eventually, everyone on the planet will be chating with AIs, and so this first wave will be satiated soon enough.

The Second Wave of AIs is measured in hours. How many hours are people using our AIs? The end goal of many visions of AI is that it be an ALWAYS ON resource. Perhaps your AI agent lives inside of your smart glasses, so it is listening to you all day and watching what you see while you are awake, and watching you, too, and guiding, whispering to you even before you summon it, because it is always on 24 hours, hopping off your glasses onto your device in the bedroom, or abiding in your walls at night. So the makers of AIs measure how many hours they deliver.

The Third Wave of AIs is measured in tokens. The real serious market for AIs is not humans, but other AIs. As we enter the agent world, one agent relies on sub-agents to do work, and these sub-agents themselves dish out work to other agents, and so on, with each layer consuming AI tokens to process, so we can quickly accumulate a vast networked system of interacting AI agents consuming tokens.

And while I can watch only so many hours of Netflix, there is no limit to how much intelligence I can consume. I can give my agents a task and have them check it and recheck it and then triple check it. Soon I will be able to deploy thousands of agents working around the clock on my projects. I can have an army of agents work while I sleep on making whatever they made 10x better tomorrow.  I could give them another day and have the army make it 100x better. And here is the catch: there appears to be no limit for better.

In a weird way, if the AIs really do what we hope they can do, they become a proxy for betterment. They also become a proxy for human time, which we are unable to manufacture otherwise. We are bound — even the billionaires among us — to 24 hours a day. But if we have human proxies thinking and working day and night — armies of them in the trillions — we suddenly have unlimited time.  AIs may be a way for us to finally manufacture additional hours in the day, without stealing it from another human. And this kind of time also seems to be insatiable.

The conundrum, of course, is that producing this infinite ocean of AI is not free. It is nowhere near free. Even though the cost per token (and the energy per token) decreases, we will use far more of them because there is no limit for betterment. That might suggest that the amount we spend on AI will continue to rise, or at least not fall as fast as we might hope. I am reminded that for many decades the price of a new laptop has sort of remained the same, at about $1,000, even as Moore’s Law raged on unceasingly, dropping the cost per transistor to almost zero. The cost of AI tokens will likely follow a similar pattern, where the cost per token falls but the total spend on AI rises. Just as we don’t really count transistors anymore, in the coming years we may ignore the count of tokens as well. We’ll switch our metrics to something more meaningful, perhaps “tasks”, or some kind of measure that reflects the value of the AI’s work.

But how do you price AIs? The 99% bulk of AIs that are inward facing, that interact with other AIs, that are invisible infrastructure, that we never notice unless they are down, these AIs can be metered. But the 1% of AIs that are outward facing, that humans interact with, that are visible, whispering into our ears, overlaying our vision, always on, probably won’t be metered, because we tend to not like meters running in our heads. We want unlimited access service, which is why we have subscriptions for things that spend our attention. We’ll avoid any meter measuring out the godhood that personal AIs give us. But the agent sitting on our shoulder, always on, has at its command, an infinite army of intelligences, always on, and this army will probably need to be metered because there is no limit to better.

When we begin comparing various unlimited personal AI plans we can imagine some of the qualities that might be advertised: speed of response; how far ahead it can anticipate; span of control (how deep of an army of subs); variety of experts on call, privacy/personalization controls,  Features and interface design will sell the service, even if tokens were free — which they will essentially be very soon.