Human: $29/Month

I spent 14 minutes trying to reach a person at this company last week.

Not on hold. There was no hold music, no queue, no apology for the wait.

Just an AI walking me, politely and relentlessly, through options I’d already exhausted. I said “agent.” It offered more options. I said “representative.” Same loop. Finally I went on their website, opened the chat window, and typed the word “human.”

A brief pause.

Then:

“Human support is available through our Premier Support plan, starting at $29/month.”

I put the phone down and stared at the screen. A person had become an add-on. A feature. A premium tier.

That’s when the thing clicked.

What the Abundance Crowd Isn’t Saying

Elon Musk has a vision.

He’s been articulating it for years. AI and robotics will produce goods and services “several orders of magnitude higher than today’s economy.” Work becomes optional. He calls it Universal High Income: not a safety net, but abundance. A penthouse for everyone. No poverty. No need to save.

Sam Altman sees it from a different angle: intelligence costs trend toward zero. Jensen Huang is already paying engineers in AI tokens. The future they’re collectively building is one of radical, almost incomprehensible cheapness.

They’re probably right about the abundance.

The part they leave out: when everything is cheap, the only thing worth paying for is what can’t be made cheap.

Buried in that logic is a category none of them have named. Products made by human hands. Services delivered by people who chose to show up. Relationships that cost someone their actual time. Presence that can’t be scheduled with a bot.

The moment Musk’s vision fully arrives, the thing that becomes scarce is a person who opted in.

Not a genius.

Not a celebrity.

A person who chose to do the slow, inefficient, unmistakably personal thing when the machine could have done it faster and cheaper.

That person becomes the luxury.

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We’ve Seen This Movie Before

In 1990, “Made in China” was a punchline.

I remember the toys that broke by day two. Clothes that faded after three washes. The assumption embedded in that label: this was the compromise. The cheap version. You bought it when you couldn’t afford the real thing.

Then something changed. Not the label. What was behind it.

BYD, a Shenzhen EV company that barely existed thirty years ago, is now the top-selling car brand in Singapore.

In the first half of 2025, they sold nearly 2.16 Million vehicles, roughly 20% of total car sales in the country.

Pop Mart, a Chinese collectibles company, created a $60 plush toy called Labubu that drove over $400 million in revenue in 2024. Lines formed outside stores in cities where “Made in China” once meant a discount rack.

The stigma didn’t fade. It flipped.

The stigma was never really about China. It was about volume without craft.

When Chinese manufacturing was optimizing for output, the label meant forgettable. When it started optimizing for excellence, the label became something else. The origin didn’t change. The intention behind the work did.

We’re about to run that same experiment on human labor. In a decade instead of three.

Fast forward to 2030

Maya is a paralegal in Toronto. It’s a Wednesday morning in 2030 and she’s shopping for her mother’s birthday.

She finds a small ceramic bowl at a boutique she’s walked past a hundred times. Rust-colored glaze, slightly uneven rim, the kind of imperfection that used to mean poor quality and now means the opposite.

The tag reads:

“Made by Human Hands. No AI involvement in design, production, or finishing. Certificate of Craft enclosed.”

The price is $340.

She doesn’t hesitate.

Maya works at a firm where 95% of first-draft legal work runs through an AI.

She’s watched the tools get better, faster, cheaper, every single year. She’s good at her job precisely because she knows what the AI misses: the context a client buries in a throwaway sentence, the judgment call that doesn’t fit the template, the thing that only registers if you’ve been paying attention. That’s what she sells now. The rest is automated.

She knows what scarcity feels like. She lives inside it every day.

The bowl costs $340 because someone chose not to use a machine. That choice is the product.

The New Premium Isn’t a Product

My customer support call wasn’t an edge case. It was a preview.

Gartner predicts that by 2029, AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention.

The remaining 20%, the complicated, emotional, high-stakes ones, will be handled by a person. And that person costs extra.

I’ve been watching this pattern move up the value chain, away from objects and into something harder to replace.

The loneliness economy is already valued at over $500 billion.

The AI companion market hit $37 billion in 2025, projected to reach $552 billion by 2035. People are paying for the simulation of connection because actual connection is harder to find. But the simulation doesn’t hold. George Mason University’s 2025 research found AI companionship can deepen loneliness over time: it fills the space without meeting the need.

So what happens to in-person?

I’ve attended three conferences this year. All sold out faster than anything I remember from before 2020. Not because the speakers were bigger. Because the room itself had become the product.

The conversation over dinner that wasn’t on any agenda. The moment someone looked me in the eye and said “me too, I don’t have this figured out either.” No AI in the room that evening. That was precisely the point.

In-person events. Real relationships. A dinner where no one is optimizing for an algorithm. A call where a person actually picks up. These are becoming what Maya’s bowl is: proof that someone chose the slow, expensive, human way when they didn’t have to.

People will pay for that proof. They already are.

The Abundance Trap

Musk and Altman are right that abundance is coming. When intelligence costs near zero and a robotics-driven economy produces goods at a fraction of today’s cost, the material floor rises dramatically. That’s real and it matters.

Abundance doesn’t solve for meaning. It makes the question of meaning more urgent.

Consumer enthusiasm for AI-generated content dropped from 60% in 2023 to 26% in 2025. Not because AI got worse. Because it got everywhere. 70% of global consumers now report discomfort with fully AI-generated creative work. The more AI floods every channel, inbox, and feed, the stronger the signal from anything made by a person who chose to make it.

The global handmade market sits at $906 billion today, projected to reach $1.94 trillion by 2033.

That’s not nostalgia. That’s a market reorganizing around a scarce input: a person who cared enough to go slowly. As I wrote in Your Moat Just Moved, the advantage that used to come from access to tools is shifting fast. What’s left is what the tools can’t replicate.

Think about vinyl records. Nobody needed vinyl back. Digital audio is technically superior in almost every measurable way. Vinyl returned because it costs something to make, something to buy, something to maintain. The friction is the point. The limitation is the feature.

I wrote about this same mechanism in What We Lose When We Stop Doing Hard Things: remove the struggle, and you often remove the value along with it.

We’re going to discover the same thing about human presence. The lag. The imperfection. The fact that a person’s attention can’t be copy-pasted or deployed across a million simultaneous users. That’s not the bug. That’s what we’re actually paying for.

The Position I Can’t Fully Justify

I build AI tools at Deeded that automate work lawyers and paralegals have owned for decades. Contracts reviewed. Documents drafted. Questions answered at scale.

We’re making legal services faster, cheaper, more accessible to people who couldn’t previously afford them. I believe in this.

But I’m watching something happen in real time that doesn’t resolve cleanly.

Every workflow we automate moves a human skill one notch closer to the premium tier.

The paralegal who thrives in 2030 isn’t the fastest drafter. It’s the one with the judgment the AI doesn’t carry. The relationship the client trusts. The read on what’s actually happening beneath the legal question being asked. I explored this directly in Who Builds Judgment When Careers Disappear?: if AI is handling the output, who is doing the work of developing the judgment that makes that output worth anything?

That person is becoming the $340 bowl.

I helped make that happen. And I think it might be the right thing and the uncomfortable thing simultaneously.

Access to legal help shouldn’t require a premium. But the human who provides it, the one who chose to stay in the room, develop the judgment, build the relationship: that person commands a price the AI won’t.

I’m building a world where the human layer is optional. Which is exactly the condition that makes the human layer precious.

We Don’t Value Things Until They’re Almost Gone

“Made in China” needed thirty years to flip.

I don’t think “Made by Humans” gets thirty years.

The AI transition is compressing the cycle.

We’re already at the point where AI-generated content is everywhere and largely undifferentiated, and we’re only a few years in. By 2030, Maya isn’t unusual. She’s the market. She grew up watching the automation of everything and she knows, viscerally, what it means when something still has a person’s hands on it. When someone actually picked up the phone. When someone showed up to the dinner rather than sending an AI summary of the conversation they couldn’t make.

The paradox holds and it doesn’t resolve.

We’re building tools that make human effort optional. That’s exactly what will make human effort precious. The bowl costs $340 because someone chose not to automate it. The dinner matters because everyone chose to be there. The call that costs extra is the one where a person answers.

We don’t value things until they’re almost gone.

The question I keep not answering: are we the generation that figures that out in time? Or the one that figures it out after?