Nye's Digital Lab is a weekly scribble at the intersection of AI & distributed networks.

This week I'm getting personal, because the writing part will matter less.

My kids are geniuses. I’m sure yours are too.

I have pictures pinned to my wall that my youngest has drawn. He wants to share the levels for a game he’s designing. My oldest draws pictures of the Dodgers. (His favorite player is Freddie Freeman.)

I also have a very large lenticular movie poster from a film I worked on 20 years ago, which I’m sure is worth several hundred dollars of "nerd convention" value, but to me, my boys’ work is far, far more valuable.

Every family refrigerator has the test the kid aced, or the photo-bombed pictures where someone sticks their tongues out. And my guess is, in the age of AI, this is the value that matters.

This isn’t just parental bias. Yes, my kids are geniuses, but what we’re witnessing a complete reshuffling of what makes things economically valuable.

When machines can create anything, the stuff that can’t be mass-produced will probably become everything.

Most economic analysis of AI focuses on job displacement. (i.e. which roles will disappear, how we’ll retrain workers, what new industries might emerge.) But these frameworks assume that value creation was always about the labor involved in execution rather than the meaning embedded in intention.

Hate to say it. That assumption is crumbling fast.

The value isn’t in Marvel’s intellectual property or the sophisticated animation pipeline that created “Into the Spiderverse.” It’s in the specific moment when two children light up because something they love found exactly the right moment to capture their imagination.

My youngest asks me to generate images of Link from Zelda. He tells me he wants Link with "his sword out," and definitely "more realistic" than anime. These AI-generated images matter to him because they show his favorite character exactly as he imagines it. The technology executes his vision, but it can’t generate his reasons for having that vision.

This is what stays with me. It makes me wonder where real value is.

The lenticular poster on my wall represents hundreds of thousands of hours of professional labor, sophisticated technology, and significant amounts of money. My son’s game designs represent maybe thirty minutes of work with a broken Crayola. Yet his drawings carry something the poster never could: authentic personal intention and the context of our relationship.

When creation becomes effortless, I’m thinking that intention becomes everything. We’re not just experiencing technological disruption, perhaps we’re discovering that most of what we thought was valuable about creative work was actually just the friction of making it.

This isn’t a future prediction, it’s why I opened by talking about my kids.

We watch over-produced corporate superhero movies designed for mass appeal, but the weird superhero comic your kid’s best friend draws for class might be what everyone actually remembers. A seven year old’s comic is probably objectively worse by every traditional technical metric, but it carries something no algorithm can replicate.

Your taste, your relationships, your specific experiences become the raw materials for an entirely new kind of economy. The inside jokes that only your family understands, the callback references to shared moments, the cultural combinations that speak to your specific community. I’m wagering that these become more economically valuable than anything designed for broad consumption.

This transformation goes way beyond entertainment. If AI handles technical execution across most fields, human value concentrates in understanding what specific people need in specific situations. It’s your understanding of people, not process.

Now, the lawyer’s edge isn’t researching case law. It’s knowing which arguments will resonate in the most personal deals. The doctor’s expertise isn’t just pattern-matching symptoms. It’s knowing how to communicate with each patient in ways that build trust and promote actual healing.

Traditional economics measured value through scale and efficiency: units produced, distribution breadth, revenue generated. But AI is making those metrics meaningless as baseline capabilities become commoditized.

My guess is we are entering an era where economic success depends less on what you can produce and more on what you choose to value and why.

That baseball game you attended with your kids might become source material for countless AI variations. Meanwhile, the World Series grand slam from the over-budgeted corporate team becomes background noise. The difference isn’t production value; it’s personal investment and authentic relationship.

The refrigerator drawings, the family inside jokes, the stories that only make sense to specific people in specific moments; these aren’t exceptions. They’re what value creation looks like when execution becomes effortless and meaning becomes everything.

Because I like to get meta on these things, I’m trying to use this essay to demonstrate the paradox.

AI helped me organize these thoughts and structure these arguments with pretty impressive capability. But it could never understand why my youngest son’s game designs matter more to me than professional artwork. The technology can execute vision, but it cannot generate the reasons for having that vision.

An AI model doesn’t really think my kids are geniuses. Right?

That kind of thinking is only for Dads like me.

That's it for this week. I do this every week. If you vibe to the ideas I express consider subscribing or sharing with friends. We'll see you next time.

Nye Warburton is a creative technologist, educator and dad from Savannah, Georgia. This essay was written with human labor, and augmented with Claude Sonnet 4. Images are pictures, or generated with Leonardo.ai.

For more information visit: https://nyewarburton.com

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