When Intelligence Gets Cheaper, Old Beliefs Get Expensive

As AI makes once-exclusive abilities more accessible, the assumptions we've built our lives and institutions around may become costly obstacles.

By Steven Twohig

Imagine driving down a road you've traveled your entire life. You know every intersection, every turn, every stop sign. You've driven it so many times that you barely have to think about what you're doing.

Now imagine that one day, the road changes. A new way of traveling makes the old intersection unnecessary. Nobody needs to stop or worry about hitting anyone else there anymore. The stop sign is obsolete, so it comes down. But nobody told you.

So you keep stopping.

Then somebody comes flying through that intersection. You think they're reckless. Maybe you even get angry.
“Somebody needs to do something about these people!
They are everywhere and they aren’t safe!”

Except they're not breaking the rules. You're following a rule that no longer exists. And because you don't realize the world has changed, evolved really, you begin judging people who are operating in the world as it actually exists, but through an old model that no longer explains it.

I wonder how many stop signs we're carrying around in our minds that the world no longer requires.

Sit with that for a moment. Where in your life do you find that you hold a concept of what is possible that doesn’t line up with what we are now capable of?

Buckle up buttercup, things are about to get interesting.

I recently listened to an episode of The AI Daily Brief in which Nathaniel Whittemore explored Venkatesh Rao's essay Cognitive Mercantilism. Rao offered an economic perspective on artificial intelligence that I found fascinating because of the work I've spent much of my life doing. My research on the carpet, and in the different circles I've been blessed to be part of, has raised questions this collective transition may finally give us a chance to study. It's a great day to be alive for a shadow work practitioner, or any depth work practitioner, really.

Let's start with some history...

Rao's story starts hundreds of years ago, when wealth was largely understood as something you controlled. Land, gold, resources, and labor were the foundations of power. If one person had more, somebody else presumably had less. As agriculture grew more productive and trade expanded, that understanding began to break down. Wealth could be created, not merely accumulated. Ordinary people weren't just labor to be managed. They were people with needs, tastes, ambitions, and the ability to want something different.

And something interesting happened. Ordinary people began wanting things they hadn't previously considered. Tea, sugar, colorful fabrics, and other goods entered everyday life. People who had once worked primarily to survive now had reasons to earn more because there were new things they wanted to experience. That desire helped drive new work and production, and eventually a world of economic possibilities that previous generations would have struggled to picture.

Consider farming. At one time, most people worked producing food. If you had suggested that someday only a small portion of the population would need to farm, someone might reasonably have asked what everybody else was supposed to do. Yet that is what happened. Food production became dramatically more efficient, and people began doing things that wouldn't have been practical in the old world.

The important discovery wasn't simply that farming improved. As the old demand for farm labor loosened, people began finding uses for their time and abilities that hadn't been practical before. Rao wonders whether we're approaching a similar moment with intelligence. If so, we're at a collective threshold that asks us to reassess far more than the tools we use. It asks us to reconsider how we understand and navigate life.

We have spent generations treating intelligence as something relatively scarce. We built schools, professions, businesses, and social hierarchies around who possessed it, who could develop it, and who could afford access to it.

Now AI is changing the cost of work that once required considerable intellectual expertise, and not by a little. In October 2026, cybersecurity researchers were calling a wave of AI-linked vulnerabilities and attacks 'Black October.' Around the same time, mathematicians were examining remarkable AI results on difficult research problems. A Harvard report described one round of tests in which every problem was solved by at least one AI system, even as the systems still struggled to explain their work and cite sources. That's both an advance and a warning. Did I say these barriers are shifting quickly? No? Well, by the time you read this, I bet there will be another headline. We don't know how fast every capability will develop, but we already have reason to rethink how we understand intelligence.

We need to rethink how we think about thought itself.

Rao argues that many predictions of human irrelevance make an old economic mistake: they assume there's a relatively fixed amount of intelligence the world needs. Once machines provide enough of it, what will human beings be needed for? That assumes our curiosity, ambitions, and uses for intelligence are already known and limited. But what if our desire to use intelligence grows as intelligence becomes more accessible?

What if someone who never considered building an application begins creating one? (Vibe coding lets you describe software in ordinary language while AI helps build it. You still have to test what it makes.)
What if somebody who couldn't afford a research team starts investigating a problem they've wanted to solve for years? AI is letting people work across subjects that once seemed closed to them.
What if ordinary people begin pursuing possibilities they haven't even imagined yet? What if our curiosity is the very superpower that will, once again, save or end the day?

Rao calls the person who recognizes this potential a cognitive capitalist. Rather than seeing abundant intelligence primarily as a threat, they see an expanding world of human curiosity, initiative, and opportunity. It's a compelling economic argument, and from my perspective, the implications extend far beyond economics.

What happens to the people whose understanding of themselves was built in the world we're leaving behind? What happens when more barriers dissolve overnight?

Pretty soon it won’t just be the stop signs. In the words of the great Doc Emmett Brown, Where we are going, we won’t need roads.

Consider three people walking into that same changing world. One has built an entire career around being the smartest person in the room. Their knowledge brings recognition, authority, money, and perhaps their entire sense of worth. For some high achievers, intelligence hasn't just been a strength. It has become how they know they matter.

What happens when capabilities that once distinguished them become widely accessible? How will they wrestle with those blowing by them at the intersection that is no longer there?

Another has spent their life believing they aren't particularly intelligent. Maybe somebody once told them they were stupid, and they've spent years protecting themselves from the risk of being found out. They stay away from certain opportunities because those things, as far as they're concerned, are for smarter people. What happens when many of those opportunities become accessible? What do they do when more barriers dissolve overnight?

The third recognizes something has changed. They begin experimenting and pursuing things that previously seemed beyond their reach. They aren't necessarily smarter than the other two. They're willing to investigate what has become possible. Will their belief in their “not enoughness” finally get the chance to be reviewed? What will they do when they have the power to create out of curiosity instead of survival?

The three may have access to the very same tools and still inhabit remarkably different worlds. And if history tells us anything, the consequences can reach much further than individual careers.

When a limitation changes, the world changes with it

Consider what happened when the birth control pill became available in 1960. Women didn't suddenly become intelligent enough to attend medical school, practice law, run businesses, or pursue careers. They already possessed those capabilities. But the ability to more reliably control when they became pregnant changed the practical circumstances surrounding many of their decisions.

Researchers Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz found that wider access to the pill helped women pursue longer professional education and contributed to later marriage. Other researchers found effects that lasted decades: women who had earlier legal access to the pill earned, on average, an estimated 8 percent more per hour by age 50, compared with women without that early access.

Think about what that means. A medical innovation helped change the timing of marriage, education, family planning, and work. More women entered professions previously dominated by men. That challenged established expectations about financial independence, who provided for a family, and what a woman's future was supposed to look like.

Laws had to change. Access to contraception became the subject of major Supreme Court decisions in 1965 and 1972. Religious institutions and communities debated its morality. Families encountered disagreements over how women and men were supposed to live. These changes weren't caused by the pill alone. The women's movement, civil rights, education, and changing economic conditions were all involved. Nor did contraception eliminate discrimination or other genuine limitations.

One change in capability helped set off consequences that unfolded over decades. Some women pursued opportunities they had never been able to plan for in the same way. Others kept living within the expectations they'd inherited. And plenty of people experienced the changes as threats to their understanding of family, morality, and social order. The technology had changed what was possible. It didn't automatically change the meaning people had constructed around those possibilities. If a person already feared women making different choices, the pill could become something larger to fear. Their existing meaning had found a new place to land.

We don't instantly abandon a worldview because circumstances change. The way we make meaning keeps doing what it's practiced doing until we begin to examine it. That's the part I want us to notice as we enter this new age of intelligence. Our identities, expectations, and institutions don't automatically reorganize themselves when the conditions that helped create them disappear. But what happens when change becomes a constant?

There's another image I've been sitting with: the stove with four burners. You've probably heard the idea that life is like a stove with four burners: family, friends, health, and work. The idea is that we only have so much energy available. To turn up one burner, we may have to turn down another.

There is truth in that. Time, presence, and physical energy still have limits. Better technology doesn't make a person available to everyone at once. But we've also spent years arranging our lives around tradeoffs that may have been shaped by the tools we had, not just by the lives we wanted. We spend enormous amounts of energy deciding which burner deserves more attention. We accept that accomplishing certain things requires sacrificing others. We organize our identities around those tradeoffs.

Now imagine some of the work that once consumed hours can be done in minutes. The same person may have new options for how to be present with family, tend to health, and contribute to work. They could begin rethinking the whole arrangement. And yet somebody could become so committed to managing their four burners that they never consider redesigning the stove top layout for fear of what that will change.

Perhaps the work burner doesn't have to operate the way it once did. Perhaps responsibilities can be handled differently, and parts of life can support one another in ways we haven't yet learned to imagine. What happens when these new possibilities have children, and those opportunities bring forth their kids...? That becomes an entirely different reality to orient from very quickly.

That doesn't mean we can have everything, or that relationships no longer require us to show up. Just the opposite. It means some tradeoffs we've treated as permanent deserve another look. Tomorrow may be unfamiliar to us in ways we can't yet anticipate. And we could make the opposite mistake: use every hour AI gives back to pile on another obligation. We could become far more productive and still be trapped inside yesterday's understanding of what makes a life worth living.

That's why I think the question is larger than how we use AI to manage the burners.

What if it's time to reconsider the stove itself?

The opportunity to watch ourselves evolve

For me, this is a fascinating time to be a depth work practitioner. I've spent more than two decades studying how people construct meaning, often without realizing they're doing it. We develop an understanding of ourselves and the world, then navigate our lives through that understanding. It becomes what we believe we're seeing. We don't simply make meaning. We orient through it, organize our lives around it, and sometimes defend it as though our survival depends on it.

A great deal of that meaning is so familiar we don't recognize it as belief. We experience it as reality. Intelligence plays a cornerstone role in how we navigate all of this.

Now imagine the opportunity presenting itself.

We're approaching a time when ordinary people can challenge deeply established assumptions about intelligence by what they can actually do. That creates an unusual opportunity to study how beliefs change, both in a person and across a society. That is an opportunity for depth work, not a prediction that everyone will change in the same way.

How long does it take somebody to reconsider what they're capable of after the evidence changes? How long before they actually attempt something different? How many people must begin behaving differently before society revises its understanding of what's normal?

Consider the professional whose identity depends on intellectual superiority. We can watch how people respond when their expertise becomes less scarce. Do they adapt their understanding of their contribution? Do they find new ways to apply their experience? Or do they increasingly defend standards and distinctions that once established their authority? Do they simply find another symbol to hide their work?

Consider the person who believes they aren't intelligent enough. How many new possibilities become available before they begin imagining themselves participating? What helps them recognize an opportunity they wouldn't ordinarily see? If our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate but that we are powerful beyond measure... What happens when a person can’t make their feeling of inadequacy about their intelligence?

And consider the person taking advantage of the new world. Does their curiosity expand? Do they develop greater judgment and independence? Or do they become increasingly dependent upon technology to tell them what to think? What happens when the barriers to creation dissolve in front of someone carrying genius yearning to break free?

We can measure the time between a new capability becoming available and somebody daring to use it. We can watch when schools, professional bodies, and families change their expectations, and when new behavior finally begins to feel normal. We can also study why some changes spread in months while others take generations, and what happens to those who feel left behind even when the opportunity is right in front of them.

There's another layer I don't want us to miss. Rao describes people who see intelligence as something to be controlled and kept scarce, and others who anticipate catastrophe because they cannot imagine enough new uses for it. Those are economic arguments. They may also reveal something about the meaning we bring to the question before we've finished asking it.

For someone practicing Turning Within, that's an invitation to get curious about projection. Shadow is meaningful resistance or distortion. Projection is how internally held meaning can become visible in the way we experience someone or something outside ourselves. That doesn't tell us in advance which interpretation is right; it gives us a reason to investigate the meaning we're carrying.

Think of the person who has built their worth around intellectual superiority. What might happen when people they once regarded as less capable begin doing work that used to require their expertise? They might be curious. Or they might feel threatened and begin looking for reasons the work doesn't count. Their judgment could contain something important about standards and safety. It could also be carrying an old argument about who deserves to matter.

Once enough people share that response, it doesn't stay private. It can enter debates about which work is legitimate, which technology should be permitted, and who gets to set the rules. A question about personal worth can become entangled with a public argument about collective risk.

But we need to be careful here.

AI presents real risks involving safety, reliability, employment, and concentrated power. A person raising those concerns isn't automatically projecting Shadow. The evidence matters, and some stop signs are there for good reason. The same is true of enthusiasm. A person who insists that AI will solve everything may be carrying just as much unquestioned meaning as somebody who believes it will destroy everything.

The work isn't about declaring which side has Shadow. It's about working with the Shadow this change brings up in us. Sometimes that is the most useful thing we can do for another person. If we can recognize our own meaning, we have a better chance of separating what is happening from what we fear, anticipate, defend, or project onto it.

When millions of people participate in those conversations, their meaning-making helps shape the institutions and expectations that follow. This gives us an unusual chance to observe how a society revises its sense of reality while the world is changing around it. That might teach us more than how quickly AI spreads. It might teach us something about how human beings evolve their understanding of themselves, and perhaps about life itself.

We should be paying attention to that.

Maintaining the mind for the world we're entering

We know how to maintain our bodies. We wash our hands, brush our teeth, and pay attention to the conditions that keep us healthy. But what are we doing to maintain the beliefs, expectations, judgments, and identities through which we make sense of life? That's what I mean when I talk about mental hygiene. It isn't forced positivity, and it isn't the elimination of every belief that makes us uncomfortable. It's the practice of developing a more intelligent relationship with the meaning we construct. As the world changes around us, tending that meaning may become every bit as practical as tending anything else we depend upon.

This is why I believe mental hygiene belongs in the conversation about our future. We don't need to assume every inherited belief is wrong. We do need the ability to find out whether it still serves the life we're living. That requires curiosity before judgment, especially when the judgment feels self-evident.

In the Mental Cleanse work I've developed, we begin with a simple question: Isn't that interesting? The question invites us to notice what our minds are already doing instead of accepting the first meaning that arrives. From there, another question becomes available: What else could this mean?

Consider how useful those questions become when the world is changing:

• How do I cultivate my intellectual sovereignty and maintain my mental hygiene in the Age of Ai?

• When I encounter a new opportunity, what assumptions determine whether I even consider pursuing it?

• When I feel threatened by someone else's success, what am I protecting?

• When technology offers to do my thinking for me, where do I reinvest that new mental capital?

• What old limitations need to be reassessed because they no longer serve or fit the world I live in?

AI can help us investigate these questions, but it can't live the answers for us. That remains our work. It requires our participation, our decisions, and what I call intellectual sovereignty: retaining authorship over how we meet the world, even as more intelligence becomes available to us. I've come to understand genius as something much more interesting than simply being exceptionally intelligent. Genius is the organizing intelligence that leverages life toward authentic expression, including the very experiences we struggle with.

I wonder what we'll discover about that genius when some long-standing limits around intelligence change. D. H. Lawrence, in his poem 'Escape,' imagines a moment when 'institutions will curl up like burnt paper.' I think about that image when I consider how much of our social life is built around identities and arrangements we seldom question.

Someone who never believed they had much to contribute might discover possibilities they couldn't previously reach. Someone whose value has always depended on being smarter than everyone else might discover that their experience is valuable for reasons they never had to examine. And someone surrounded by extraordinary answers might discover that thinking for themselves has become more important, not less.

None of that is automatic. Access to intelligence doesn't guarantee wisdom, curiosity, or the capacity to recognize our own meaning-making. The technology changes the conditions. What we make of those conditions is part of the work of being human. And the moment to pay attention is while the change is happening, not after yesterday's way of seeing has become tomorrow's invisible assumption.

That's why I believe this moment deserves... no, demands our attention.

We have an opportunity to watch beliefs meet changing reality: which assumptions evolve, which stay invisible, and which are defended even after the circumstances supporting them have changed. Some limits we've accepted may prove less permanent than we imagined. Other limitations, including new ones, will still need to be faced on their own terms. Through that process, we may learn something about the nature of meaning itself: how we construct our understanding of reality, what makes us hold onto it, and what allows it to evolve.

These aren't questions only for economists or AI researchers. They're questions for anyone who has ever mistaken a belief about life for life itself. The world may be changing faster than our inherited ways of understanding it. If the mathematics of Turning Within holds, learning to tend and recalibrate the meaning we live through may become essential, not just for our well-being but for our ability to participate intelligently in the future we're creating.

The challenge may not be that we're incapable of traveling the road ahead. It may be that we're still stopping at intersections that no longer require us to stop. And if we're paying attention, we might discover that we don't simply need a better way to drive. We may need to reconsider where we want to go.

Steven Twohig is the author of Turning Within and founder of the Evolving Mind Project.

Sources and further reading

• Venkatesh Rao, Cognitive Mercantilism, October 25, 2026.

• Nathaniel Whittemore, The AI Daily Brief: AI Won't Make Our Minds Useless According to 400 Years of History, November 1, 2026.

• Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, The Power of the Pill, 2002.

• Martha Bailey, Brad Hershbein, and Amalia Miller, The Opt-In Revolution?, 2012.

• Nick Yetto, Where Did the QWERTY Keyboard Come From?, Smithsonian, 2023.

• James Clear, The Four Burners Theory.

• Josh Turknett, The Genius and the Impostor: The Neuroscience of Unlocking Human Potential (2026).

• Steven Twohig, Turning Within: Reclaiming Your Soul from Shadow (2024).