“If the cost of a good’s inputs decreases, the quality of that good decreases.“

If the cost of a good’s inputs decreases, the quality of that good decreases.

In the industrial revolution, cotton became much cheaper and easier to collect in larger quantities. Based on this, an analyst would assume the number of clothing items would increase. This would have been true. 

A bad analyst would also assume that the quality of the average clothing would increase. The rationale would be that clothing manufacturers would no longer have to worry about the cost of cotton, and could instead put a lot more effort into their clothing. 

Due to the rise of fast fashion, the average piece of clothing rapidly comes apart and lasts for less than 4 wears before being thrown out. While quantity of the components and quality might seem non-correlated, they are inversely correlated. 

Another example is cameras, the rise of cheap digital cameras hasn’t allowed directors to easily record and publish movies like Twelve Angry Men, instead it’s led to the proliferation of reels movies. More worrying, this trend applies to all movies with a bulk of modern cinema becoming poor quality sequels. 

Artists already internalize the law, by referring to one of their own: Constraints generate Quality. When you have a limited amount of film, you focus and spend effort on each shot, but when recording is just a tap of the button, you just film. 

Clothing and Movies might be superficial examples, but this law impacts the entire world around us. The cost of a transistor has fallen rapidly, with modern laptops containing over 64 GB of ram. However, the proliferation of transistors has led to modern websites being slow to load on 64GB of ram due to excessive animations and high quality images. To load a website shouldn’t take over 5,000 times the RAM used to send a man to the moon. 

Ofcourse, good quality clothing (Patagonia) still exists, but the number of people with exposure to good quality clothing has gone down. High Quality websites (McMaster-Carr) still exist, but the bulk of people are used to bloated animations with the exception of a few outliers. 

If this is the case, what does this mean for the era of cheap intelligence? As the core input in every good (intelligence) is going to get cheaper, the outputs are going to get much worse. When SaaS software had limited units of intelligence flowing in, every interaction and every behavior had to be thoughtfully considered and optimized. When anyone can build software in 30 seconds, how much worse are online booking websites going to get? How much worse is the DMV going to be if all human touch is removed and the cheapest local LLM is processing my license renewal?