GAILC Working Paper 001 (Version 2): The Human Presence Economy — Synthetic Abundance, Provenance Scarcity, and the Emerging Economic Value of Being Human

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence is progressively reducing the marginal cost of producing text, images, audio, video, analysis, interaction, and forms of output that previously required scarce human capability. This paper asks what may happen to economic value under those conditions — not primarily as a question about synthetic media, but as a question about the economics of scarcity itself. This paper proposes the Human Presence Economy: a research thesis holding that as synthetic capability becomes abundant, demonstrably human participation may become comparatively scarce along several distinct dimensions — participation, judgment, attention, responsibility, relationship, and embodied experience — and that this scarcity may, under identifiable and limited conditions, acquire economic value. The paper develops six research propositions: Synthetic Abundance, Provenance Scarcity, Human Presence Scarcity, the Human Presence Premium, the Accountability Premium, and Contextual and Potentially Self-Limiting Value. It deliberately treats these as testable hypotheses rather than settled findings, and devotes a dedicated section to the conditions under which the thesis would fail. Communication and synthetic media, the focus of the prior version of this paper, are treated here as one application among several — alongside professional services, healthcare, education, leadership, craftsmanship, and caregiving — rather than as the definition of the framework. The paper situates its claims against existing research in labor economics, signaling theory, information economics, the experience economy, and relational labor. The central research question is: If AI makes synthetic capability abundant, what happens to the economic value of the human who cannot be reduced to the capability being simulated? This paper does not answer that question with certainty. It establishes the Human Presence Economy as a GAILC research program to be tested, challenged, and refined — including by evidence that the thesis is wrong, or right only in narrow domains.