At my work, there is a menu of AI helpers. The smartest one costs the most and I can only call on it a few times a day. A middle one has a daily budget, like an allowance. The cheapest one I can use as much as I want. The first time I saw this menu, I had a simple thought: what exactly am I paying for?
So I tried all of them, one by one. The pattern was clear. The expensive one just moves on its own. Give it a goal, and it plans, checks itself, and finishes without much guidance. The cheap one needs everything spelled out, step by step, or it gets lost halfway through.
Fine. Smarter costs more. Nobody at my office questioned this, and neither did I, at first. But the more I used the menu, the stranger it started to feel. In the world of AI, we say “smarter costs more” out loud, on a price list, without any embarrassment. It is printed right there in black and white.
Try saying that about people. We do not print price tags on human minds. We say everyone is equal, that everyone deserves the same respect and the same chance. And yet, quietly, the world runs on the same logic as that menu. The hard decisions go to a few trusted people. The routine work goes to whoever is available and cheap. We just never write it down. The AI menu did not invent this idea. It only printed something we already knew and never said.
Once I noticed this, my own habit at work started to look a little different to me. I sort my own work by price every day without thinking about it, and I tell myself this is just being careful with a budget. But in a smaller way, it is also what every workplace already does with people. It sorts minds by cost, and calls it common sense.
I don’t have a neat conclusion for this. I am not going to stop using the menu, and I doubt anyone else will either. But there is something oddly comforting in one small fact: nobody has printed a price tag on me yet. At least not one I can see.