Every October, in a wood-paneled chamber at the Royal Courts of Justice, a bizarre legal performance unfolds.
The King’s Remembrancer, a judicial officer whose title feels like a relic from a Tolkien novel, presides over a desk. Before him stand representatives of the City of London. They are there to pay the rent on two pieces of land—an agreement that has remained legally binding since the 13th century.
The first payment for a plot in Shropshire consists of two knives: one blunt, one sharp. The second, for a long-lost forge in the parish of St. Clement Danes near the Strand, is more substantial. A City official produces six oversized horseshoes and exactly 61 nails.
The Remembrancer watches as the nails are counted out, one by one. When the final nail is placed, he delivers the ritual verdict: “Good number.”
The ceremony is a charming quirk of British tradition, but it hides a profound economic truth. In 1235, providing 61 nails and six shoes was not a token gesture. It was a transfer of significant industrial value. To produce those items, you needed a chain of human effort that spanned the known world: miners to pull ore from the earth, colliers to produce charcoal, and a master blacksmith to spend hours at a glowing anvil, coaxing functional geometry out of raw iron.
In the 13th century, iron was a high-stakes technology. To own a forge near the Strand—land that today sits in a real estate corridor worth hundreds of millions of pounds—was to own a critical node in the medieval economy.
But today, you can buy 61 nails at a hardware store for the price of a cup of coffee. The “rent” hasn’t changed in eight centuries, but technology has fundamentally broken the meaning of the payment.
The Deflationary Engine
Technology is, at its core, a deflationary engine for whatever it touches.
It takes something that is scarce and requires intense human effort—like forging a nail—and makes it so abundant that we stop thinking about it entirely. We live in a world built on the assumption that nails are free. Because they are cheap, we don’t just build the one stable or the one cathedral; we build a housing boom. We build furniture that we assemble ourselves and discard when we move. We build an entire civilization on the back of things that used to be precious and are now ordinary.
This transition is the hallmark of every industrial revolution. When we find a way to automate a task, the cost of the output collapses. The “good number” stays the same, but the energy required to reach it vanishes.
The Perspective of the Blacksmith
We often talk about technological progress in the aggregate, celebrating the “miracles” of the steam engine or the internet. But there is an emotional realism to these shifts that we rarely acknowledge.
For the 13th-century blacksmith, those 61 nails were his identity. They were the physical manifestation of his skill, his social standing, and his livelihood. He understood the temper of the steel and the rhythm of the bellows in a way that no machine ever would. When the first mass-production techniques arrived, his expertise didn’t just become less valuable—it became irrelevant.
It’s easy to celebrate technological progress from the perspective of society. It’s harder from the perspective of the blacksmith.
Every revolution makes certain forms of skilled labor feel suddenly ordinary. It is a painful, visceral experience to watch something that you spent a lifetime mastering become a commodity that a high school kid can buy with twenty minutes of minimum-wage labor. This isn’t just about money; it’s about the loss of scarcity as a proxy for worth.
The Cognitive Forge
We are now standing in the heat of a new forge.
Artificial Intelligence is doing to cognition what the power loom did to weaving and the automated factory did to blacksmithing. It is taking things that were previously high-value, high-effort human outputs—drafting an essay, writing a block of code, summarizing a 50-page report, or generating a high-fidelity image—and making them abundant.
If your identity is tied to the “forging” of these outputs, the vertigo is real. We’ve spent the last fifty years building a “knowledge economy” where the ability to synthesize information was our most valuable real estate. Now, an LLM can perform that synthesis in seconds for a fraction of a cent.
Like the 61 nails, the output is becoming a commodity. Code is getting cheap. Analysis is getting cheap. The raw artifacts of knowledge work are entering a period of massive deflation.
Shifting Value Upward
The lesson of history, however, is that value doesn’t disappear; it shifts upward.
When nails became cheap, we didn’t stop building; we built more complex structures. When computation became cheap, we didn’t stop calculating; we built the internet. When intelligence becomes cheap and abundant, we won’t stop thinking. We will simply start building things that previously felt impossible.
The opportunity in these shifts rarely comes from defending the old scarcity. The blacksmith who tried to prove his hand-forged nails were “better” than the machine-made ones was eventually crushed by the sheer math of abundance. The builders who won were the ones who realized that because nails were now free, they could suddenly afford to imagine a world made of wood and steel on a scale never before seen.
We are entering a world where the “nails” of intelligence are becoming free. The drafted email, the boilerplate function, the initial research pass—these are no longer the destination. They are the raw materials.
Every industrial revolution begins by making something valuable feel worthless. But that worthlessness is the soil in which abundance grows. As we count out the nails of this new era, the goal isn’t to protect the forge. It’s to realize that for the first time in history, we have enough nails to build anything we can imagine.