OPINION
Artificial intelligence is changing everything— how we work, communicate, create, and decide.
To some, it feels like a marvel.
To others, like a threat.
I see both.
Because while AI offers tremendous efficiency, it also represents something far more unsettling: the end of scarcity in the realm of human effort.
That might sound like a good thing—but it isn’t always.
In fact, it may be the very thing that makes AI so dangerous.
In economics, scarcity is the fundamental condition that forces choice.
Because we can’t do everything or have everything, we must prioritize.
Scarcity disciplines us.
It shapes effort into something meaningful.
It teaches patience, prudence and trade-offs.
But AI is obliterating this constraint.
What once took a team of people and weeks of work can now be done in minutes—on demand, at scale and nearly free.
The friction is gone. The cost is gone. And soon, perhaps, so too will be the wisdom that cost once demanded.
Take litigation, for example.
If legal services were free— if anyone could sue anyone at any time without paying for a lawyer—people would file lawsuits over every perceived insult or social slight.
There’d be no incentive to settle, no need to compromise.
Courts would be overwhelmed, and justice itself would drown in triviality.
This is what happens when action becomes uncoupled from consequence.
We lose the natural hesitation that scarcity once provided.
We act not because something must be done, but simply because we can.
This is the moral hazard of AI: it allows endless actions without effort, endless words without thought and endless consequences without ownership.
We’ve seen this before: just look at social media.
Before social media, sharing an opinion in public required time, courage and some measure of accountability.
You had to write a letter to the editor, attend a meeting, face another human being.
Now, it takes seconds to broadcast anything to the world—true or false; kind or cruel. Because there’s no perceived cost, there’s no filter.
Bad manners flourish.
Nutty ideas go viral. Complexity gets flattened into slogans.
And now, with AI, we can mass-produce all of it—automatically.
AI produces output without investment.
It makes it easy to act without reflection.
And that ease—far from being neutral—is morally hazardous.
When nothing costs us anything, we stop asking what’s worth doing.
We stop thinking carefully.
We stop choosing at all.
Flooded by possibilities, we drift toward what is easy, what is flashy, what is immediate—we drift toward everything.
But moral discernment requires more than convenience.
It requires scarcity.
Not because limitations are fun, but because they remind us we are human.
As a small-town lawyer, a political activist (“sorta”) and a man who does a lot of thinking while drinking coffee, I’ve come to believe this: Not everything that can be automated should be.
Some things—like justice, truth and conscience— require struggle.
They require time.
They require cost. This world we live in is more than atoms, chemical reactions and electrical pulses.
There is a God. There is His law. It is that law—not our algorithms—that holds the world together and makes it work.
We would be wise to remember that every day.
And yes, in case you’re wondering: I used AI to help draft this column. Which is precisely why I’m writing it.
“Hey Hal, get me some coffee - NOW!”
John Haughton is the managing partner of Haughton Law Group. He can be reached at [email protected].
