The panic is palpable. A new technology emerges that automates cognitive work, and the executive conclusion seems simple: “We can do the same work with fewer people. We can cut costs.”

This is a tactical error, rooted in a profound misunderstanding of what’s actually happening. It’s like squeezing a water-filled balloon: the water doesn’t vanish. The pressure just builds and forces the water in the balloon to bulge out between your fingers.

The pressure doesn’t disappear. It just moves.

Every efficiency gain isn’t a deletion of cost; it’s a redistribution of pressure. The system doesn’t create or destroy capacity; it only transforms how it flows. What we are witnessing is a kind of economic thermodynamics, and to understand it, we have to stop thinking about individual jobs and start thinking about the entire system.

In the first chapter of the gtm engineering mindset for leaders and operators, we will explore the situation with a systems thinking mindset:

1. constant containers, elastic contents

The human economic system operates within two primary containers.

• Time: This is the ultimate, non-negotiable constant: 24 hours per person. It is the final container for all economic activity.
• Resources: This is the total sum of human attention and physical resources at any given moment. (While monetary mass is “leaky” via central banks, redefining it as “attention + physical resources” makes the container finite at any instant).

Technology does not enlarge these containers. It cannot. It only changes the efficiency and density of how contents (value, activity, focus) circulate inside them. Therefore, a productivity gain doesn’t create a surplus in a vacuum; it shifts pressure points. It re-defines what is scarce, what is valuable, and what competes for our finite attention.

2. the conservation loop: scarcity migration

This redistribution follows a predictable pattern, which we can describe as a “conservation loop.”

It begins with Jevons paradox: Lowering the cost of a capability (e.g., generating text, analyzing code) dramatically expands the domain where it can be applied. Total utilization rises as latent demand, previously blocked by cost, floods the system.

This creates the loop:

1. Efficiency improves in one domain (e.g., generation).
2. Demand rebounds and saturates that domain.
3. Value and scarcity migrate to the next scarcest domain (e.g., interpretation).
4. The system equilibrium resets at a higher baseline of complexity.

This is the engine of the new economy: scarcity migration. AI makes the generation of content (code, text, images, strategy) nearly free. Therefore, scarcity and with it, all economic value migrates from generation to judgment.

3. the new finite: judgment and coherence

What remains finite? What cannot be scaled at the same rate as computation?

• Temporal Bandwidth: Human experience is serial. We have only one focus at a time.
• Entropy and energy: physical throughput still obeys limits.
• Cognitive Resolution: The ability to derive meaning and understanding cannot scale at the same rate as computation.

This is why you don’t fire your team. In a world where AI can generate a million options, the entire economic pressure moves to the human act of validating them. The new, supremely scarce resources; the new binding constraints of the economy are:

• Discernment: In a flood of AI-generated options, which one is correct, ethical, beautiful, or effective?
• Coherence: How do you weave 1,000 distinct AI-generated tasks into a single, unified, meaningful project?
• Purpose: Why are we asking the AI to do this in the first place?

You don’t need your team for their hands anymore; the AI has hands. You need them for their taste, their collective judgment, and their shared wisdom. Firing them means firing the very thing that just became the new bottleneck.

4. The brutal implication: constraint sophistication

This leads to a profound, non-utopian conclusion. There is no escape from scarcity, only its migration. Every solved problem simply reveals the next binding constraint.

We are not building toward abundance. We are building toward increasingly sophisticated forms of rationing.

The history of economic progress is a history of scarcity migration:

• First, we rationed survival (food, shelter).
• Then, we rationed goods (physical products).
• Then, we rationed services (access to human time).
• Currently, we ration attention.

Now, we are beginning to ration meaning and coherence. In a world of infinite, generated noise, the most valuable “product” is a clear, trusted, human-validated signal. The system doesn’t grow; it folds into higher-dimensional configurations.

looking forward

Progress isn’t liberation from constraints. It’s constraint sophistication. We don’t get more; we get more granular. The game doesn’t end; it just gets more meta.

Every technological reduction of cost widens the circle of possibility until a new form of coordination, trust, or interpretation becomes the binding constraint. The total economy is a moving equilibrium of efficiencies chasing new scarcities.

In the next chapter, we will see if the viral claims on LinkedIn on replacing your $500K team with a magic workflow is fact or fiction.