Institutions for the Post-Scarcity of Judgment

Fuente: arXiv
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1. Verfasser: Lovén, Lauri
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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_version_ 1866914562347892736
author Lovén, Lauri
author_facet Lovén, Lauri
contents Each major technological revolution inverts a particular scarcity and rebuilds institutions around the shift. The near-consensus diagnosis of the AI revolution holds that AI collapses the cost of prediction while judgment remains scarce. This Opinion argues the inversion has now flipped: competent-looking judgment (selecting, ranking, attributing, certifying) is produced at scale and at marginal cost approaching zero, and four complements become scarce: verified signal, legitimacy, authentic provenance, and integration capacity (the community's tolerance for delegated cognition). Because judgment is the substance of institutions, the institutions built to manufacture legitimate judgment (courts, journals, licensing bodies, legislatures) now compete with the technology for the same functional role. The piece traces the pattern across scientific institutions, professional licensing, intellectual property, democratic legitimacy, and foundation-model concentration, and closes with a three-move agenda: reframe AI policy as institutional redesign, build provenance and verification as commons, and develop the formal apparatus for institutional composition under strategic agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_22966
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Institutions for the Post-Scarcity of Judgment
Lovén, Lauri
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
K.4.1; K.4.2; I.2.0
Each major technological revolution inverts a particular scarcity and rebuilds institutions around the shift. The near-consensus diagnosis of the AI revolution holds that AI collapses the cost of prediction while judgment remains scarce. This Opinion argues the inversion has now flipped: competent-looking judgment (selecting, ranking, attributing, certifying) is produced at scale and at marginal cost approaching zero, and four complements become scarce: verified signal, legitimacy, authentic provenance, and integration capacity (the community's tolerance for delegated cognition). Because judgment is the substance of institutions, the institutions built to manufacture legitimate judgment (courts, journals, licensing bodies, legislatures) now compete with the technology for the same functional role. The piece traces the pattern across scientific institutions, professional licensing, intellectual property, democratic legitimacy, and foundation-model concentration, and closes with a three-move agenda: reframe AI policy as institutional redesign, build provenance and verification as commons, and develop the formal apparatus for institutional composition under strategic agents.
title Institutions for the Post-Scarcity of Judgment
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
K.4.1; K.4.2; I.2.0
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22966