CONCEPT
Stratified Divergence
The second candidate basin — a two-tier system where a small population develops judgment and a large population cycles through tool adoptions without upward mobility.
The stratified divergence is the basin of attraction produced when the AI transition democratizes production but concentrates the development of judgment. A small population of practitioners develops the higher-order capacities — judgment, taste, strategic intelligence, the ability to direct AI tools toward outcomes that serve genuine needs — and commands a premium for those capacities. A much larger population operates at the level of tool competence, producing adequate output directed by the upper tier, cycling between successive waves of tool adoption and retraining without developing deeper capacities. The configuration is self-reinforcing through the economics of skill development and carries distinctive political and normative consequences.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The mechanism is the economics of upper-tier capability development. Judgment, taste, strategic intelligence require time, mentoring, and institutional support to develop — resources available to those who already occupy positions of sufficient economic security to invest in long-term capability development, and unavailable to those whose economic position requires the continuous production of saleable output.
The stratification is different in