Human-Provenance Verification should be Treated as Labor Infrastructure in AI-Saturated Markets
We argue that AI-saturated markets are likely to create Veblen-good premiums, which we term human-provenance premiums, for verified human presence, and hence AI governance should treat human-provenance verification as labor infrastructure. Generative and agentic AI systems lower the cost of many standardized cognitive, creative, and coordination tasks, weakening the scarcity premiums that have supported much middle-tier knowledge work. We argue that this pressure may produce an asymmetric barbell-shaped structure of value capture in advanced economies: high-volume synthetic production controlled by owners of AI infrastructure at one pole, and scarce, high-status human labor valued for ver...
| Authors | Erin McGurk, David Khachaturov |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 4 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 May 2026 |
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