The Adequacy Flood

William Stanley Jevons demonstrated in 1871 that when the quantity of any good increases, the satisfaction provided by each additional unit—its marginal utility—falls. A glass of water to a dying man in a desert has enormous marginal utility; the same glass to a man standing next to a river has almost none. When AI reduces the marginal cost of producing competent cognitive output toward zero, the rational response of every market participant is to produce everything with any positive marginal value, no matter how small. The result is a flood of output that is technically adequate—functional code, grammatically correct prose, serviceable design—but practically negligible in value. The thousandth AI-generated report on a given topic provides near-zero insight to the reader who has already encountered nine hundred and ninety-nine similar reports. The fiftieth AI-designed logo in a client presentation adds almost nothing to the decision. By the mid-2020s, the symptoms of this condition were visible across every domain AI had