Vibes, Cash & Automation - How AI Is Rewriting Human Value

Originally published on 31 December 2025. Lightly edited for this portfolio in July 2026.

In The Republic, Plato describes a society held together by a useful fiction. Its citizens are told that different metals have been placed in their souls: gold in those suited to rule, silver in those destined to defend, iron and bronze in those expected to produce.

Modern societies recoil from the explicit hierarchy, but the underlying machinery remains familiar. Every social order needs some account of why certain people rise while others do not. It needs a sorting system, and preferably one that allows unequal outcomes to appear legitimate.

During the twentieth century, the language of metal gave way to the language of merit. Intelligence, education, discipline and ambition replaced noble blood as the approved explanation for success. The hierarchy remained, but entry into it was supposedly open. Anyone sufficiently talented and industrious could climb.

Artificial intelligence is now beginning to disturb this arrangement. The abilities most closely associated with meritocratic status, analysing information, producing polished language, writing code, synthesising arguments and performing specialised cognitive work, are becoming widely accessible through machines. Skills that once signalled years of education can increasingly be borrowed for the price of a monthly subscription. Thus the social sorting machine will not simply disappear, but search for new criteria.

Intelligence Becomes Infrastructure

For much of the modern era, advanced reasoning functioned as a scarce resource. Lawyers, engineers, academics, consultants and programmers earned status partly because they could perform forms of intellectual labour that most people could not. Their expertise required time, institutional access and often considerable expense. Knowledge did not merely help them work. It distinguished them socially.

AI weakens that distinction. This does not mean expertise has become irrelevant or that anyone using a chatbot suddenly possesses the judgement of an experienced professional. It does mean that the visible outputs of intelligence are becoming easier to reproduce. A person can now draft a legal document, analyse a dataset, construct an argument or generate functional software without fully possessing the knowledge traditionally required to produce it.

When capable reasoning can be rented for €20 a month, intelligence begins to resemble infrastructure. It remains immensely useful, but usefulness and prestige are not the same thing. Running water is indispensable precisely because nobody considers access to it evidence of nobility (yet).

This creates an unusual pressure on the current cognitive elite. A society that spent decades telling people that intelligence justified hierarchy must now explain what happens when many of its outward signs become abundant. The answer is already emerging. As technical competence becomes easier to imitate, status migrates towards qualities that resist measurement: Vision. Taste. Authenticity. Cultural relevance. The ability to know what matters before everyone else does. If you will, the revenge of the art school has officially begun.

The Return of Taste

Taste appears more human than intelligence because it is difficult to formalise. It is presented as instinct, sensitivity or inner depth rather than technique. But taste also has a social history: a person raised around art, architecture, travel, expensive objects and particular forms of speech accumulates patterns that later appear intuitive. They learn which references signal sophistication, which combinations feel vulgar, which imperfections look deliberate and which merely look incompetent. By adulthood, this accumulated exposure may register as something close to instinct.

What we call taste is thus partly perception, partly memory and partly social training. That does not make it fake. Every human capacity emerges from some mixture of inheritance and experience. It does, however, complicate the idea that taste represents a mysterious quality of the soul. Often it is cultural pattern recognition built through access.

AI makes this awkwardly visible. Machines can already reproduce recognisable styles, combine references and approximate aesthetic conventions. Their outputs frequently feel generic, but generic human work was hardly rare before generative models arrived. The discomfort comes partly from watching something once treated as inward and ineffable appear as a reproducible arrangement of patterns.

As machines absorb more technical labour, human value is increasingly relocated to the act of selection. The prestigious person is no longer necessarily the one who can execute the work, but the one who can decide what should exist, recognise what feels current and reject what does not. This sounds liberating at first, but it can also create a softer and more opaque hierarchy.

When Merit Turns Into Vibes

A society organised around examinations, credentials and measurable performance can be cold, but its procedures are at least visible and deemed largely fair. One can often identify the rule by which one has been judged.

Taste is harder to contest. Once institutions begin selecting people according to “fit,” presence, sensibility or cultural fluency, exclusion becomes difficult to distinguish from intuition. The gatekeeper does not need to say that someone lacks the correct upbringing, accent or references. They can simply say that the person was not quite right. The judgement may even be sincere. Social codes are most powerful when those enforcing them experience their preferences as natural.

This is where the promise of meritocracy begins to fray. Education once offered a relatively clear bargain: acquire the skills, demonstrate competence and earn admission. When competence becomes abundant, the criteria become less tangible. A person may possess the qualifications and perform the task while still lacking the elusive quality through which elite institutions recognise themselves. The resulting figure is increasingly common: technically capable, heavily educated and permanently adjacent to the world they were told education would unlock.

AI intensifies the problem because it places pressure on precisely the abilities these people were instructed to cultivate. They followed the meritocratic script, only to discover that the market is beginning to discount its central credential. The hierarchy then survives by changing its language. Yesterday, intelligence distinguished the exceptional from the ordinary. Today, everyone must speak of taste. And tomorrow, it may simply be money.

Simulated Status, Physical Scarcity

Digital culture has already transformed how hierarchy is experienced. Previous generations encountered the wealthy intermittently, through magazines, films or rare physical proximity. Social media turned elite consumption into a continuous broadcast. Private islands, hotel suites, wardrobes, restaurants and homes now circulate endlessly through screens. The lifestyles of a small minority have become part of the daily visual environment of millions. This does more than produce aspirational envy. It teaches people what desire itself should look like.

At the same time, many of the physical goods associated with that lifestyle have become less attainable. Property ownership recedes. Exclusive destinations grow more expensive. Access to space, privacy and security increasingly depends on wealth. Technology offers compensation through simulation. The apartment may be rented, but its digital image can be perfected. The journey may be unaffordable, but its aesthetic can be consumed. The object may be inaccessible, but its symbolic language can be reproduced in games, filters, virtual environments and online identities.

The early rhetoric of the Metaverse overstated how literally this future would arrive. People may not spend their lives wearing headsets in digital villas, but the broader movement is already familiar: the substitution of representations for ownership and access for possession. Music is streamed rather than collected. Software is subscribed to rather than owned. Images of luxury circulate more freely while the material foundations of luxury, land, space, mobility and security, remain scarce. The virtual world democratises appearances far more readily than it democratises actual property.

Money Is the Last Metal

AI complicates Plato’s hierarchy because it can increasingly perform tasks associated with every class within it. Production becomes more automated. Surveillance and security become more computational. Management, strategy and administration acquire machine assistance. Even symbolic leadership can be imitated through systems capable of processing information and producing persuasive decisions. As human function becomes less central to production, ownership becomes more central to status.

This is the crucial shift. A person’s place in the hierarchy was once justified by what they contributed: expertise, labour, courage, leadership or intelligence. If machines increasingly supply those functions, the distinction between those above and below becomes harder to defend through merit alone.

Capital requires no such defence. Taste can distinguish insiders from outsiders within a particular cultural world, but it cannot easily provide a universal social ranking. People disagree about what is beautiful, authentic or relevant, and the judgements of one group may carry little weight beyond it. Money is different, since its meaning travels. A salary, property deed, inheritance or market valuation can be understood across classes and cultures, even by those who reject the system that produced it. Wealth does not need to be universally admired to function as hierarchy; it only needs to be universally legible. As credentials, expertise and technical competence increasingly lose their scarcity, money remains one of the few signals whose social meaning almost everyone can still read.

Money thus remains scarce even when intelligence becomes abundant. It purchases the time required to cultivate taste, the freedom to fail creatively, the ability to live in desirable places and the ownership of the infrastructure through which others access automated intelligence. It also converts easily into the qualities that supposedly transcend it. Wealth can purchase education, aesthetic exposure, experimentation, health, privacy and social confidence. Over time, these advantages are reinterpreted as personality.

The person with capital can afford to appear authentic because their survival does not depend on pleasing anyone immediately. They can pursue unusual ideas, reject conventional employment and take repeated risks. What looks like spiritual independence may, ironically, rest on an extremely material foundation. This is why money increasingly appears to be the only metal left. Intelligence can be automated. Taste can be imitated. Status can be simulated. Ownership remains stubbornly physical.

The old meritocratic vocabulary will persist at first. Institutions will continue to speak of talent, vision and hard work. But beneath the language, the sorting machine may become simpler: those who own the systems and those who rent access to them.

After Meritocracy

Artificial intelligence could widen access to forms of power that were previously restricted. It can reduce the cost of expertise, help people cross educational and linguistic barriers and allow individuals or small groups to produce work once reserved for large institutions. That possibility is real. So is the possibility that the assets surrounding those capabilities remain concentrated: the models, platforms, data centres, energy systems and physical spaces through which automated intelligence is accessed. We may arrive at a society in which cognitive power is widely available while economic autonomy remains unevenly distributed.

But this does not necessarily mean that the hierarchy replacing meritocracy will be simpler or less sophisticated. Plato’s metals were a remarkably blunt social fiction. They assigned people fixed substances and treated hierarchy as destiny. Meritocracy introduced a more elaborate story. Rank became something earned through education, discipline, intelligence and competition. The system appeared more open because movement within it was at least theoretically possible.

The hierarchy emerging around AI may become more intricate still. It may reward not a single quality but the ability to combine many of them: technical leverage, aesthetic judgement, social intelligence, timing, ownership and the capacity to direct machines towards worthwhile ends. The person at the top may no longer be the one who knows the most or works the hardest, but the one who can assemble the right tools, people and ideas into something that others value.

This order could be more exclusionary in some respects and more open in others. AI may weaken the power of credentials, geography and inherited access while increasing the importance of capital, networks and cultural fluency. It may allow people who were poorly served by the old sorting machine to demonstrate abilities that institutions failed to recognise.

The next noble lie may therefore be more convincing than meritocracy because it may contain more truth. People really will possess greater expressive and productive power. A single individual really may be able to act with the capabilities of a small organisation. New routes into status, influence and economic participation may genuinely appear. The fiction would lie not in claiming that these possibilities exist, but in presenting their availability as equal.

Plato understood that hierarchy needs a story. The modern West chose meritocracy because it made inequality appear dynamic rather than inherited. An AI society may choose a story of universal agency: everyone a creator, strategist, entrepreneur or director of intelligent machines. That story need not become merely another deception. It could describe a genuine expansion of human possibility, even while obscuring the inequalities that remain beneath it.

Perhaps the challenge is not to imagine a society without any sorting machine, but to build one in which the promise of wider agency becomes real enough that the lie has less work to do. ■